<p>You know what they teach in statistics: four anecdotes equals a trend.</p>
<p>On the whole, engineers still have a much better unemployment rate than most other occupations, even if it is still a little slow given the economy. The odds are instead that your civil engineering example just graduated into a terrible market after the housing and construction bubble burst and there were some sort of issue with each of the other three examples. Without more info, there is no way to even speculate as to what those issues may have been.</p>
<p>There has been a lot of noise made about the engineering shortage, and while most people agree there is a real shortage, the market hasn’t really showed it. For example, if there was a shortage, you would expect salaries to rise faster, but they haven’t. The problem is that while there are a lot of jobs open for engineers, businesses are having a hard time finding engineers with the skills they are actually looking for to fill these positions.</p>
<p>The actual problem there depends on your perspective. From the businesses’ point of view, colleges aren’t preparing students with the right skills to meet their demands. The Wall Street Journal has a significant number of articles about this and they are rather interesting. Probably the largest complaint is poor verbal and [written[/url</a>] communication skills on the part of new engineers, but there are a host of others.</p>
<p>Of course, from the other side of things, businesses seem much less likely to be willing to train new employees as much as they used to ([url=<a href=“Don't Blame Students for the Jobs-Skills Mismatch - WSJ”>Don't Blame Students for the Jobs-Skills Mismatch - WSJ]example](<a href=“Our College Graduates Can't Write! - WSJ”>Our College Graduates Can't Write! - WSJ)</a>). They want to see those employees come in and make and immediate impact, and that is often unrealistic. This trend is noticeable in that these days internships are all but required to get a job immediately after graduation, which wasn’t always the case. It just so happens that however degree programs are structured overseas may currently better suit this particular model of hiring, so you see a lot of that going on.</p>
<p>The solution probably needs to be somewhere in between. Colleges need to do a better job of trying to meet the needs of employers, particularly in communication skills, but companies need to realize that at times they seem to wish engineering degrees were more vocational, and that really doesn’t breed innovative engineers, so they need to move back toward being willing to train new employees more.</p>
<p>And now I’ve ranted. Sorry about that.</p>