Engineering Job Future

White House View of Job Trends, Pt. 2

Staff Article, written by Don Wilde

This article continues my analysis of the July 2009 report issued by President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, linked here.

Highlights of Worker Skills

The CEA identifies three major traits of a successful worker in the future  economy:

• Critical thinking and analytical problem solving skills
• Flexibility
• More Education

Critical Thinking

They all fit together. In order to generate sound analyses that make sense in the real world, you need to have a solid grounding in the way the world works and this comes from education, whether institutional or the 'hard knocks' variety. You also need to have the flexibility to look at problems from different perspectives. The phrase 'critical thinking' does not mean criticising, it means making rational judgments based upon provable facts. In engineering, this means getting a good grounding in both the tools of the trade such as mathematics and the scientific method and it also means getting hands-on experience actually building things and seeing how they work.

Flexibility

Mr. Obama's CEA is quite blunt in defining flexibility as the ability to find a new job if the old career goes away. Just as draftsmen and telephone switchboard operators are no longer needed, now many high tech jobs are either withering or morphing. It's not just globalization that is having an impact; but changing technology as well. The report points out that many specialties in hot demand today didn't exist in 1967.

Unfortunately, the shifting job market doesn't allow engineers to simply learn a new technology like we used to learn new programming languages or engineering tools. Today's market requires engineers who want to thrive to aquire skills in one (or more) of four areas in order to survive: marketing and sales, project management, people management, or business. Engineering is not going away, but the reality is that many technical engineering jobs are being obsoleted, automated or offshored. There will still be technical jobs for the cream of the labor pool, but the vast majority of current engineers need to accept reality and grow in broader directions.

Ultimately, the ability to create a new successful business venture is the most viable of all, but it requires skill development (or partnering) that encompasses all of the growth areas identified above. The upside is that besides having the largest potential return on investment, the technical entrepreneur can utilize his own skills as a business advantage and differentiation.

Education

Besides the often repeated mantra that more education leads to better pay for a whole career, the CEA report suggests that they expect to see the largest increase come in areas where vocational training (or 'associates' degrees) is the necessary component. This is a very unfortunate focus, because that sort of training is usually very job-specific and is extremely vulnerable to technology shifts. Unlike a four-year college curriculum, which gives a broader and deeper skill set, such programs generally create a glut of workers trained in very narrow specialties.

For example, in New Mexico, thousands of workers have been turned out over the last ten years with 'network administrator' credentials, driving the going price down to as low as $15 per hour. Many of those trained were also subsidized by state and federal programs. They completed their training programs and discovered that there was a shortage of companies that needed their services because they were trained in very narrow specialties on software that was already obsolete, and because the State of New Mexico is not a state that encourages and fosters entrepreneurial growth. This example will probably be repeated by the Obama administration on a national scale, because the same conditions hold true.

Summary

The Obama adiministration did its best to put a positive spin on the economics of the next eight years, and many of their positive projections are encouraging. They also highlight the need ofr engineers to look out for themselves and develop a broader skill set in order to thrive. Engineers are better positioned than most career specialists, because the return for investments in technology -- and hence, their value -- is and will remain high.

The best bet for those with more than five years left in their working careers, and especially those who are just developing their careers, is to develop, first, a positivve attitude about marketing and business management skills, and second, knowledge and capability in one or more arena of such growth.