Any look at the reports, studies, and surveys over the years will tend to convince even the most hardened skeptic that there is a real shortage of engineers out there. However, if there is a true shortage, then one can reasonably expect almost all engineers to be gainfully employed. But, as far as engineering jobs are concerned, the purported staff shortage hardly seems to match reality.

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	Any look at the reports, studies, and surveys over the years will tend to convince even the most hardened skeptic that there is a real shortage of engineers out there.

Just to test out my hypothesis that there are plenty of engineers in the market looking for jobs, I conducted a simple test. I typed the keywords "engineering jobs" into a popular keyword-search tool called "SEO Book" that provides the monthly search volumes of keywords and compares the results of those keywords in major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN [SEO Book also contains other search tools (http://tools.seobook.com)]. The results showed that in the month of June alone, there were, in the U.S.:

• 46,837 searches for engineering jobs
• 6,647 searches for electrical engineering jobs
• 6,398 searches for civil engineering jobs
• 4841 searches for computer engineering jobs
• 4169 searches for mechanical engineering jobs
• 4134 searches for chemical engineering jobs
• 2394 searches for audio engineering jobs
• 2310 searches for software engineering jobs
• 1652 searches for industrial engineering jobs
• 1628 searches for sound engineering jobs
• 1239 searches for biomedical engineering jobs
• 1148 searches for environmental engineering jobs
• 1071 searches for aerospace engineering jobs
• 1068 searches for marine engineering jobs
• 928 searches for petroleum engineering jobs
• 924 searches for power engineering jobs
• 865 searches for structural engineering jobs
• 763 searches for automotive engineering jobs
• 735 searches for process engineering jobs
• 665 searches for contract engineering jobs
• 630 searches for electronic engineering jobs
• 529 searches for architectural engineering job
• 462 searches for manufacturing engineering jobs
• 417 searches for network engineering jobs
• 385 searches for nuclear engineering jobs
• 375 searches for engineering management jobs
• 350 searches for engineering sales jobs
• 301 searches for mining engineering jobs

And so on and so forth.

The question is, who are these people looking for engineering jobs and generating more than 50,000 searches within only one month? Non-engineers wouldn't be spending the time and effort to look for engineering jobs. So, there's only one possible conclusion. These are engineers who want new or different engineering jobs. Now, the search volumes may not surprise you, and you may say that it is expected, in any industry, to have that volume of job searches in a month. However, when you realize that the number of searches for "engineering jobs" (46, 837) is higher than the number of searches for "sales jobs" (41,003), or "medical jobs" (39,123), or "attorney jobs" (10,402), or even more than the number of searches for "marketing jobs" (30,618) in the same month in the U.S. market, then you start wondering about the real picture. Is there a real shortage of engineers or not? And if there is a shortage, then why is the volume of searches for engineering jobs higher than that of other occupational fields?

The answer is that the demands of an engineering job and the skill sets associated with it change with technology. The more fast-paced these changes, the greater the speeds with which openings in the engineering fields present themselves. Jobs in engineering fields change their paradigms faster than jobs in other occupational fields, and rapidly changing technology ensures that the engineers who are available in the labor market are rarely the engineers who employers are looking for. Therefore, employers experience a shortage of employable engineers in the market.

When testifying before U.S. Senate committees on the issue of labor and education affecting the shortage of skilled engineers in March 2007, Bill Gates complained that Microsoft has been unable to fill at least 3,000 technical jobs due to a lack of available skilled personnel. Gates went on to say, "We simply cannot sustain an economy based on innovation unless our citizens are educated in math, science, and engineering." So is the shortage of quality or rather of readily available quality?

I feel that the principal reason for employers seeing a shortage of quality staff really begins with the employers themselves. Employers are reluctant to invest in training for new employees. Most employers prefer to hire candidates with the exact skill sets they require. In order to do so, employers often prepare extremely narrow job descriptions that most of the available talents find difficult to match. This is the reality. And the fact is that engineers, more than people in other occupational fields, need to keep up with the times in order to remain employable.

On the net:

Where Has All the Talent Gone?
www.elecdesign.com/Articles/ArticleID/15863/15863.html

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