Engineering Job Future

The Obama White House's VIew of Job Trends, Part 1

Staff Article, written by Don Wilde

President Obama's white house staff released a report stating their view of the future of the job market as it will look in 2016 in America. The report was published in July 2009.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/Jobs-of-the-Future/

I'd like to highlight some observations made by the President's Council of Economic Advisors in this report, as they point to opportunities and cautions for engineers who are looking ahead.

In their overview of job growth and decline in the developing economy, they cite three areas of hope: health care, aerospace and pharmaceutical manufacturing, and construction. As an electronics and firmware engineer for a quarter century, I can find rays of sunshine in each of these, even construction.

In health care, there is a growing shortage of American doctors and nurses, so there will be a huge demand for assistive devices that ease their work load and also assist non-English-speaking doctors and nurses imported from places like Central America and Ukraine. Many of these devices will also need to meet the extremely rigorous standards for medical devices, so there will be a huge demand for enginers who develop a specialization and experience in that arena, much as "MIL-SPEC" used to be in the 1960's.

There is also already a surge in software engineering for medical record-keeping and billing systems development, and that surge will only intensify as the Democratic Congress passes whatever they pass in "Health Care Reform." This increase in computerized record-keeping will also continue to fuel the growth in large computer server farms, leading to opportunity in server design and hosting companies.

In aerospace, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for both military and resource survey duty is increasing, and this provides opportunity for innovative small engineering companies to design and produce control and sensor sub-systems to enhance these. While the large-scale aircraft market will see as many declines as increases due to the lessening need for high-performance combat aircraft, there is hugely fertile ground in the unmanned sector. UAV's are made in larger quantities than fighter jets, too, so manufacturing automation engineering is another coming hot spot in aerospace.

That's the bright spot for engineers in the pharmaceutical industry growth trend as well. Manufacturing of pill packaging and handling systems, as well as the manufacturing of all other medical delivery devices and systems, requires an increase in the number of manufacturing facilities with corresponding increase in automation equipment.

There is hope for manufacturing in general, but it's not jobs for the obsolete labor force of the past. Even without the "Buy America" sentiment of protectionist politicians and labor union advocates, Americans are growing weary of the fact that American companies have shipped engineering jobs overseas so fast that the Chinese design engineers -- skilled and trained as they may be -- are forced to re-learn the lessons of many years of American product design from the ground up. This disappointing new reality of crappily designed consumer products is leading to a desire to bring more of the engineering back to America.

In order for manufacturing to work in America again, several factors are critical. Government has to be careful of how they regulate. For example, handmade toy manufacturing in America was recently completely snuffed out by an ill-considered regulation intended to ensure the quality if imported Chinese toys. Secondly, Americans must finally accept with fervor the complete autiomation of factories and warehouses. There is absolutely no place left in manufacturing where we can afford to pay unskilled or even semi-skilled labor hour after hour to perform a repetitive job.

This means that the only sector for such workers to move into is the construction sector, and this means that there is a market for savvy engineers to design gadgets that help speed up and ensure the quality of building construction. Construction will also see an increase in the number of 'Smart House' and green building designs being implemented, leading to design opportunities in those fields.

Not mentioned in this report, but very pertinent, is the movement to make the power grid more adaptive and decrease the amount of energy used in homes and buildings. Solar power is still too expensive for mass deployment unless heavily subsidized, but efficiency engineering in infrastructure equipment like power switch gear and HVAC systems will become more and more pressing.

Finally, it appears that the Obama administration has acknowledged that its initiatives for green jobs are stalling, at least from an engineering perspective. While they claim that "Environmental-related" jobs will increase rapidly in  teh next decade, they also admit that that's starting from virtually zero so the actual number will not be great.

They also have appeared to be doing a good job of shooting themselves in the feet in that arena. A good friend of mine has been attempting to comply with the requirements for obtaining a grant for building an algae-oriented bio-diesel production plant, but he's been completely frustrated because the people in charge of the grant have been rewriting the rules several times a month and delaying the acceptance date as they madly stuff the books with more unsustainable job creation ploys.

So, there is hope in the midst of caution from the White House. In Part 2 of this article, I'll examine the report's wording on skill assessments and educational needs for engineers in the coming eight years as the White House calls it.