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| Momma, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Engineers |
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By Jared B. Jamison I have recently attended a couple of seminars where the speakers stated that they planned on purposely steering their children away from majoring in engineering in college. Now these speakers were pretty smart people, so they were not so easy to dismiss. One of the speakers was a PhD economist with the Federal Reserve and the other was the CEO of an international technology firm, not to mention a registered professional engineer. Their basic argument for steering their kids away from engineering was that engineers will be commodities as the trend of globalization continues. The most valuable skills over the next generation in the US will be creativity and the ability to innovate. What they are saying seems to make sense in principle, right? We should eventually start outsourcing labor, including knowledge workers like engineers, overseas to labor-intensive countries such as China and India. The US is a capital-intensive country that also has a long track record of successful innovation and entrepreneurship. In order to be successful in the US in the future, people should concentrate on creating, innovating and providing capital. Is this where we are headed? According to a 2005 National Academy of Sciences study, in 2004, the US graduated 70,000 engineers while China and India graduated 600,000 and 350,000 respectively. We don't have a chance, do we? Fareed Zakaria discusses this engineering imbalance in his book, "The Post-American World". When you dig a little deeper, it turns out that a large number of the engineers graduating in India and China do so from technical institutes with non-engineering curricula. The US actually graduates more true engineers per capita than does India or China. The quality of education in the US is much higher as well. Zakaria goes as far to suggest that higher education is the best US industry. The fact is that the demand for quality engineers in China and India is greater than their current supply of engineers. Friends of mine from India tell me the same thing. It looks like we are still a long way from having our engineering done overseas. In fact, Asia sounds like a good potential market for US engineering firms! Now what about creativity and the ability to innovate? Most engineers don't have a creative bone in their body, right? I have some thoughts on this that I will post later, but I would love to hear what others think about this. I would also love to hear if anyone is currently outsourcing engineering functions overseas. Please share your thoughts with the "Add new comment" link below. |
Comments
I had lunch recently with a large local developer and contractor who agreed the design team is irrelevant to a project and any design team can give you the same design. I insisted that a quality design takes more time and therefore should cost more ultimately saves them money. The problems they are experiencing are costing them $100,000 in the field could be avoided by paying $10,000 more for quality design services.
The trend of working for no profit will plague the industry for years to come. We need to work together to reverse it so that our children will want to become engineers. It requires increasing the public perception of engineering and limiting industry regulation.
Personally, I intent to tell my girls to chose a profession where someone pays you to know something they don’t and allows you to practice anywhere in the country. Beyond that you have to be passionate about your work. No amount of money will ever inspire you to get out of bed every morning, for much more than six months.
As far as Engineering becoming a commodity, I believe it is trending that way but can be resisted if Engineers stop treating their work as routine and continue to innovate within their profession.
Innovation can be stifled in the litigous environment we live in. That is why it is important to create strong relationships with quality owners. As ASFE says, "friends don't sue friends."
A more viable path to economic success on a global basis is to "sell" what the U.S. has always had in abundance that does not typically exist in other countries and this is our Intellectual Capitali.e.innovation,conc eptualization, creativity and design concepts - we have a long history of these attributes in this country that the rest of the world does not have.Based on my experience with China we can sell our Intellectual Capital to a world that truly hungers for our experience in conceptulizatio n & innovation. We provided the Chinese with concept/sketches think SD thru almost DD and assisted them with the presentations to obtain capital within their country with their Architects/Engineers producing the CD.
Intellectual Capital Marketing is loved by our Insurance Underwriters and the profits are large vs. time spent-what's not to love!
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