SAE International sponsored a report at the end of 2023 that says that the U.S. is already facing a shortage of engineers, and that the problem is going to get worse. SAE International is a professional organization for wireless engineers that has 128,000 members worldwide.
According to the report, the U.S. needs 400,000 new engineers every year. They say one-third of engineering jobs go unfilled and the trend will continue at least through 2030. The U.S. is not the only country facing an engineering shortage, and the report cited Japan and Germany as having similar problems. The American Council of Engineering Companies, which represents nearly 6,000 engineering firms, sent a letter to the White House to describe the same crisis.
The SAE report lists some of the reasons for the engineering shortfall.
- We’ve had a longstanding cap on H-1B visas at 85,000 per year, which covers all technical positions and not just engineers. Unless that cap is lifted, the country will have to somehow fill the gap domestically.
- There is a mismatch between the engineering skills available and the demand. The report says the biggest engineer shortage is for software, industrial, civil, and electrical engineers. There is a market glut of material, chemical, aerospace, and mechanical engineers.
- SAE also sees a knowledge gap for many engineers. Many open engineering positions need engineers that are familiar with next-generation techniques.
- There is still a big gender gap. While 60% of all college students are women, only 20% of engineering graduates are women. Filling the need is going to require attracting more women to become engineers.
- Perhaps the biggest problem of all is that most of the people who want to become engineers don’t make it. Only 13% of high school students who express a desire to become an engineer make it to graduation with a college degree in engineering. Even more startling, only half of those who graduate college with an engineering degree go on to become engineers, as many are lured into other technical jobs.
- An interesting observation is that tech companies are reluctant to cross-train their engineers or even join any industry-wide efforts to attract more engineers to the field. There is fierce competition for engineers, and employers are fearful of losing more than they gain by such efforts.
The report sees no easy fix for the engineer shortage. They suggest strategies like training technicians to fill some portion of the engineer’s role. They suggest more training programs in junior colleges and trade schools for the kind of technical training that can fill some of the engineer roles. They suggest retraining for engineers from less in-demand disciplines. They think there must be a reexamination from bottom to top for schools and universities to find ways to attract more students to STEM degrees, but more importantly, to help students to complete degrees.
The U.S. is at an interesting crossroads. We’ve started a process of bringing a lot of our manufacturing back to the U.S. Automated factories can replace many of the lower-skill jobs in a factory, but there can be no replacement or shortcuts for the engineers and the technical people needed to design and operate our complex new factories.
I think it’s worth mentioning the general education issue. Before engaging in too much speculation about mechanism and motivation, it’s worth saying a few things about the underlying dynamics. Education and culture are key parts.
The stats and the implication of the stats probably aren’t quite right.
Currently lots of H1b’s go to outsourcing firms. That’s a matter of lowering wages not being unable to hire. (https://www.epi.org/blog/the-h-1b-visa-program-remains-the-outsourcing-visa-more-than-half-of-the-top-30-h-1b-employers-were-outsourcing-firms/)
There is controversy about whether we actually need as many engineers as people are saying we do. The key question is what’s happened to the salaries in the fields that have the purported shortages? You’d expect them to be spiking which… they aren’t. (Under Biden, real middle- and blue-collar wages are going up for the first time in decades, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a “spike.”) The fact that there’s a lot of publicity around the shortage doesn’t necessarily mean there’s an absolute shortage, it can mean “shortage at the wage the employer wants to pay.” Lots of companies would like to grow on the cheap. Advertising and not filling a position can also mean that you’re not that desperate to fill it.
Trade schools are a classic response to the “shortage,” implying (probably correctly) that lots of technical work can be done without a degree. Employers require degrees for jobs that don’t need them. (https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/dismissed-by-degrees_707b3f0e-a772-40b7-8f77-aed4a16016cc.pdf) Why is that? It’s not for the “soft skill” reasons that are usually claimed — it’s so that employers can sort the resumes into two piles because *they have more applicants than they want to deal with*. The employer is still going to have to do a lot of training for someone with a degree, but it lowers risk: the candidate is probably going to be a culture fit for a job where everyone else has a college degree and they’ve proved they’re capable of muscling through a four year program, which isn’t nothing (it’s also why it’s been long and slow to diversify culture and gender makeup).
There are stats that show tons of people not finishing STEM degrees or not getting STEM careers after getting a STEM degree. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/most-with-college-stem-degrees-go-to-other-fields-of-work/2014/07/10/9aede466-084d-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.html
STEM != engineering, but I think it still gets back to the underlying issue which is whether we are culturally oriented towards making lots of low cost, high skill STEM/engineering graduates that companies want for entry level to compete with global workforces.
(The opinions…) There is certainly a mismatch with high education / medium wage requirements. So, one thing we see is a “supermodel problem” where there is a crazy queue of people trying to get into very top salary places (FB/Google/OpenAI/… in the software world) and lots of jobs that are either not great career building block or not top salary targets. The future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed.
Meanwhile, TV is flooded with programs glorifying the lives of the wealthy. We live in an expensive society, home ownership is very hard to achieve. We allowed predatory student loans to create a massive financial handicap for an entire generate (who, without debt relief, won’t be buying consumer goods that drive the economy forward…) They were promised good jobs, which is kind of true… they just aren’t necessarily good enough to pay off loans at high rates. But, 18 year-olds always make careful, smart decisions, right?
Probably, the real problem is downstream effects of late stage capitalism where we’ve allowed unequal wealth distribution to flourish, monopolies and monopsonies to flourish, generational wealth to flourish, and a culture that celebrates avoidance of the responsibilities involved with being a citizen. In an unequal society, getting a job as an engineer isn’t the smartest move — that’s our biggest problem.
The *real* problems are coming when the boomers retire, because we’re definitely not prepared to lose a large number of deeply skilled, medium-wage employees. The people who make paint and chemicals and machine parts and soybean oil don’t have a replacement generation trained up and waiting in the wings…
there’s been an epidemic of businesses requiring a degree for a job that doesn’t need or benefit from it. Some sort of ‘if you showed up and did your school work for 4 years you might be a good employee’ garbage. They’d probably be better suited to asking for high school GPA and anyone that got a 3.0 or better will have those characteristics also.
As far as shorages, I think that a major factor is the outlook on those jobs. Who’s putting in 4 years for a $40k engineering job that is likely going to an H1b anyway? I’ve seen this first hand. It’s probably part of the racism that is maintained because ‘the immegrants’ are actually taking those jobs. To be clear, I think this is backwards because the immegrants are just people trying to get ahead and the businesses are exploiting their willingness to work for 1/2 price. The guy that doesn’t get the job has a different perspective.
The problem i see is that the only way to fix the current situation is governmnet regulation from a government that’s really bad at regulation. Prevailing wage programs for visa workers would be a way to remove the exploitation based ‘advantage’ they have (irony of that statement acknowledged).
There’s no simple fix, but foundationally we need to build up our middle class and Engineering jobs are and will be good jobs for a long time. If we’re going to improve things, step 1 is getting all the people that’ll actually do the work into a good life and reenvigorate their love of their country.
In the uncomfortable position of defending a policy I don’t prefer:
The unnecessary college degree requirement comes when businesses have more applicants than slots. So, telling those businesses to be less selective because…somehow…they’ll be able to filter out top applicants from less information… isn’t going to go anywhere. Their HR people are all looking for ways to sort the resumes into two piles.
Big companies (generally) have tons of profits and lots of flexibility around the labor market. They can lowball positions they’re only so-so on filling. Or, they can offer high compensation and be very selective. Most of them aren’t dealing with life or death decisions. Small companies feel the pain downstream from those actions.
There’s been consistent pressure on legislators to clean up the H1B so that we’re not just importing cheap labor. And, counter-pressure from big employers who like cheap labor. Major anti-trust prosecutions would help a lot, as well as reforms in the whole H1B qualification thing.