Engineer (STEM) Labor Shortage?

Engineering Shortage Persists | EE Times

India still holds sway in software

Rick Merritt, CTO, Radfan

“Engineers are impossible to find,” says Frank Kern. He should know, as chief executive of product engineering firm Aricent the employs 11,000 software developers.

To make his case, Kern uses an example from a recent trip to Rensselaer Polytechnic to attend the graduation of his nephew. The young engineer had nine job offers; he accepted one from Tesla.
[RPI Annual Report 2014.pdf says 18% of graduates had yet to find a job, 58% were employed]
Kern has set up centers in Michigan while at IBM and has created a new center in Louisiana for Aricent. The trick in the U.S., Kern says, is getting out of high-cost areas such as Silicon Valley and locating near universities in states that offer tax incentives. The European and North American centers tend to have fewer than 150 engineers, rather than the couple thousand working in the mega-sites in India.
“You don’t have to move everything off shore, but it’s the type of people you can get and number of them,” he says.
Today, Aricent is increasing its efforts with semiconductor companies, developing high-level software for their reference boards then following their design wins to do work for their OEM customers. The next big step in offshoring, he believes, will come from the Web giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook
For more on the dymanics of the engineering profression, check out our 2014 Salary and Opinion survey.

The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage - The Atlantic
Far from offering expanding attractive career opportunities, it seems that many, but not all, science and engineering careers are headed in the opposite direction: unstable careers, slow-growing wages, and high risk of jobs moving offshore or being filled by temporary workers from abroad. Recent science Ph.D.s often need to undertake three or more additional years in low-paid and temporary “postdoctoral” positions, but even then only a minority have realistic prospects of landing a coveted tenure-track academic position.
Among college-educated information technology workers under age 30, temporary workers from abroad constitute a large majority. Even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad—U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.

Debunking Myths About Highly-Skilled Immigration and the Global Race for Talent - HBR
Take academics Hal Salzman of Rutgers, Norm Matloff of UCLA, and Ron Hira of RIT, who insist that there is no skilled labor shortage. They published papers through big labor think tank Economic Policy Institute that support its arguments against immigration reform and the expansion of H-1B visas for foreign workers. Salzman says that the US graduates far more workers in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics (STEM) than the tech industry needs and that foreign workers are causing Americans to get discouraged and join other professions. Matloff claims that foreign students have talent lesser than, or equal to, their American peers. Hira says that claims of a shortage are a ploy by tech companies to bring wages down and to replace Americans with foreign workers.
The comment boards of articles about immigration are often filled with heart-wrenching stories of American engineers who can’t find employment. They too blame foreigners for their woes. So what gives? Could there indeed be a vast conspiracy by the technology industry to exclude Americans from the innovation economy?
The truth is we’re not seeing the full picture around highly-skilled immigration. To get there, we need to better understand and debunk myths around three key issues: labor mobility, wages, and the rate of invention.
While there are unemployed engineers in the US at the same time that there are severe shortages of talent in the tech centers, this is really a mismatch of skill, location, and need.


 The STEM Worker Shortage Is Real - US News
It should be well-accepted that the U.S. economy could use more workers with high levels of knowledge in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The shortage of these skilled STEM professionals eased during the recession, but by any conventional definition, now it appears to have returned.
For one thing, wages have grown relatively fast in most STEM-oriented occupations, which is a clear indication of a shortage. From 2000 to 2013, analyzing Bureau of Labor Statistics data and adjusting for inflation, median salaries for workers in computer and mathematical, health care practitioner, engineering, and science occupations rose 8 percent, 7 percent, 6 percent and 5 percent respectively, even as those for the average U.S. worker showed no growth. Software developers, for instance, saw salaries soar 26 percent over the same period, culminating in an average of $82,000 in 2013, up from $48,000 in 1980. More broadly, an analysis I completed earlier this summer for the Brookings Institution of census data showed a large relative increase in the STEM earnings premium – about 60 percent – from 1980 to 2012, controlling for education, experience and gender.

A shortage of scientists and techies? Think again - CBS News
A common refrain among corporate and political leaders is that the U.S. needs more engineers, scientists and other workers with the kind of specialized expertise needed to boost economic growth. And that assessment plays a part in a range of public policy debates, from how to change the nation's immigration laws to how to energize job-creation.
But new federal data suggest that idea is largely a myth, and it raises questions for students who are planning their careers. Roughly three-quarters of people who have a bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering and math -- or so-called STEM fields -- aren't working in those professions, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.
Citing statistics from its most recent American Community Survey, the bureau found that only about half of engineering, computer, math and statistics majors in the U.S. had jobs in their chosen field. Science grads fared even worse: Just 26 percent of physical science majors and 15 percent of those with a diploma in biology, environmental studies or agriculture were in a STEM-related occupation.