We are facing an ongoing threat to America's global economic leadership and increasing the number of engineers in our workforce is one powerful way we can change our destiny as a country.
In Silicon Valley we have one engineering job open for every two engineers that are employed -- this means it is hard to find enough qualified workers and so companies move jobs offshore to India and China where they graduate many more engineers than we do. Today we simply do not have enough people trained in the "STEM" areas to staff the technology build up that is happening globally (STEM -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
When Steve Jobs met with President Obama earlier this year he made this case strongly. From Walter Isaacson's new biography:
Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. 'You can't find that many in America to hire,' he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could train them. 'If you could educate those engineers,' he said, 'we could move more manufacturing plants here.'
But today not only do we not graduate enough engineers, women are a huge untapped resource. Less than 10% of our computer engineering graduates are women, and less than 20% of our total engineering bachelors are women -- a criminal loss of potential contribution from half our workforce.
Technology is an area that is a wonderful example of American leadership. Leadership, innovation and the place where we can say "Made in the USA" with pride. Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook -- all are growing, innovative global technology leaders. All are changing the world today in dramatic ways. All are essentially American and all need more engineers. Google and Microsoft both invest heavily in change agents like the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology precisely to change the ratio of men to women in engineering and so produce more qualified engineers to grow their businesses.
Just as in the Second World War we had a national shortage of skilled workers for manufacturing, today we have a critical shortage of technology workers. Women and education are two keys to the solution.
Seventy years ago the Rosie the Riveter campaign moved 6 million women into the workforce. These women were trained and they showed that they could do the work -- building the planes, ships and munitions necessary to win a devastating war.
Senator Gillibrand of New York talks about a revival of the Rosie the Riveter campaign to galvanize women to become more empowered and she speaks about the need for women to get Off The Sidelines. She's right, and it's bigger than politics. The low percentages of women who graduate with technology degrees in the U.S. shows the untapped resource. Getting women involved and into technology creates more jobs for both men and women in manufacturing and the ecosystem around the technology jobs.
We are in the middle of a 100-year technology revolution, analogous to the Industrial Revolution that dramatically changed the Western way of life through the 18th and 19th centuries. This Technology Revolution is taking us through a series of technology innovations: the computer, the microprocessor, software applications, the internet, mobile devices and there is more to come we can only imagine.
It's time for Rosie the Engineer and Robert the Engineer. We need our political leadership to invest in STEM education, and especially for our girls to bring them into the technology field. It's time to put programs in place to motivate our students to get technical degrees so they can get jobs when they graduate. We need engineers, the technology jobs pay more, and they create more jobs in America for everyone.
Follow Penny Herscher on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pennyherscher
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/a-generation-of-ceos-who_b_1030485.html?
Soon this country will not be able to build or design anything.
If companies want more engineers, they need to make the career more attractive. This means more stable employment, higher wages, and more respect.
I've had young people ask me if they should major in engineering. I warn them that the field has been historically very cyclic and that we are not as well respected as the other professions (doctors, lawyers, finance, etc). It's a good choice if you really love math and science. It's also one of the harder majors.
For the most part, I think you pretty much have nailed it. However, for me, it is the lack of respect that gets me more than anything. The engineering profession is still treated as a commodity and many CEOs continue to talk out of both sides of their mouths. On one hand, they claim that there are not enough engineers and people in the math and science fields -- but then they turn around and lay people off to turn a profit. If people "really" cared about the U.S. competitiveness when it comes to technology, the would do something about the inequity of school systems and would treat vocational courses as important as courses in the Arts and Sciences --but then that would not be as attention grabbing as spreading propaganda about the lack of engineers and technical talent.
I went back to the local campus this year of the big ten school I graduated from in the early 80's to take some course to hopefully strengthen my standing at my current position or perhaps make me more marketable should the worst happen.
Major sticker shock. When I first went to college at this big ten school the in state tuition was around 21 bucks an hour now its $252/credit hour and it was just announced will be going up another 8% for spring!
My question is what value has been added to the college degree that can possibly justify a 10-12 fold increase? way beyond any measure of inflation over that period of time? one might make the case that the value has diminished since so many of these jobs have been offshored and wages have largely stagnated or even declined
This continued until the US government de-emphasized science, technical, engineering and mathematical (STEM) educations.
My wife told her that all engineers are just like her daddy and his engineer friends, hard headed, know it alls, and that you cannot tell them anything.
Maybe we engineers need to be more considerate of those around us. (But maybe not.)
There will soon no technical design capability when US recent graduate engineers are not trained as engineers by performing detailed engineering and CADD drafting under the direction of an older and experienced engineer in an apprentice/mentoring type experience as required for a professional engineering license.
We need legislation to impose prohibitively high import duty tariffs to prohibit the import of technical engineering services and CADD drafting services.
once filled to the rim classes now maybe have a half dozen students
demand for CAD drafters has gone offhsore
Asian CAD operators might be only 50% as productive as US CAD operators, but they will work for 5% of the pay scale.
Repetitive Engineering design and calculations are also being outsourced to Asian nations for the same cost saving reasons.
The USA will soon be void of the technical capability to create/design/develop anything to manufacture or build.
The Asian and other industrialized countries produce very few of these non-technically educated students that will generally not contribute anything to the foreign trade or create wealth for that country.
This will not be easy, but it must be accomplished immediately before it is too late.
The USA has instead elected to produce large numbers of liberal arts graduates, history graduates, philosophy graduates, English graduates, foreign language graduates, economics graduates, musicians, artists, social workers, government graduates, political scientist, and/or other similarly educated US citizens that will not contribute anything to correcting the foreign trade deficit.
US financial resources for education should be spent on regaining the technological edge on the rest of the world, rather than the US government buying Wall Street created toxic assets and constructing US government pork barrel projects with US dollars borrowed back from industrial nations.
The USA must somehow create funds to finance the re-creation of a superior Human Technical STEM Database that is required to win any technology war.
We need to reverse course of our educational system and re-emphasize science and engineering to create many more medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and educators as the US educational system did prior to the 1970's, instead of non-technical subjects.
Our India operations are central to the company's overall business, rather than just an outsourcing model," said Udit Mathur, general manager of FirstRain India. "With over 100 employees here in India, our move to a state-of-the-art facility shows FirstRain's commitment to ensuring the success of its staff and its India operations. I look forward to further expanding our team in our new Gurgaon location in the coming months
http://www.firstrain.com/press/april_11_2007.php
What do you have to say for yourself and your company, Ms Herscher? Perhaps you'd like to recommend that US engineering curricula include courses in Hindi and Telugu.
Job postings are littered with examples of the search for the "five pound butterfly" (thanks to another post for that metaphor). The sheer volume of required skills and level of experienceÂ, coupled with chump-chanÂge salaries is no wonder some jobs go unfilled. Instead of sweetening the deal to attract workers, businesses complain that they can't find qualified workers.
Add to that the categories of workers that companies avoid hiring -- women of childbearing age (they might go on pregnancy leave), people with less that 5 years experience (not enough knowledge), anyone over 40 or 50 (they want too much money and don't like long hours), a person who'd be taking a step downwards (they won't be happy and won't stay), ad nauseum.
IronicallyÂ, many of the same companies that won't pay to train an employee will spend significanÂt sums on legal assistance for L1's and H1B's, not to mention assistance on getting a green card. Right after getting turned down for a $900 training class, I saw a memo at work about reimbursemÂent of up to $5000 for immigratioÂn legal assistance. Interesting....
Here's my solution -- for every L1 or H1B that a company adds to their rolls, they pay a tax equal to the cost of retraining one unemployed American worker for that position.
In the beginning of the H1B explosion, the funds received for the program were supposed to be used to retrain US Citizens in STEM.
That apparently never happened and where is the money that was collected over these decades for this?
The Gov't also shot us in the foot when they decided to give away technological secrets to foreign countries for FREE.
Out of this, came easy and cheaper learning of these skills by countries with a lower standard of living, a good grasp on the English language and an ever increasing population that wants to be part of the main driver of today's skill for survival (Technology) - Of course I'm referring to India.
Corporations are hiring H1B's because they don't have the overhead (Medical being the most expensive) they would if they employed a Citizen, they work on a project basis and they can be easily removed when not needed anymore.
But the main reason for hiring an H1B versus a Citizen is the fact that an H1B worker will work 80 hours, get paid less and will do what is told without complaining.
Any complaint from an H1B worker puts him/her at risk of losing the job and being deported. If they happen to find another job, they have to start the whole H1B filing process and waiting period (I think it's like 5 years) to apply for a green card.
So the Corporations have their subservient worker for less than a complaining US Citizen worker.
This is obvious to anyone who works in technology.
The $5000.00 for Immigration legal assistance is much less than the Healthcare cost alone, plus the other costs like Training, sick time
The key point however, is that tech-savvy and engineering folks DO NOT GET PAID AS MUCH as graduates with MBA's, so why go out and earn a wage that is going to keep that person in the hole for 10 or more years of their career WHILE they gain experience in a field that can change rapidly as technology evolves.
Of course there are a minority of people from both camps (tech and finance) that make more than average or less of course, but the averages for the two are significantly different in salaries and bonuses.