Qantas chairman, Leigh Clifford, has penned an article today in The AFR calling for Australia to boost the number of people studying engineering:
My background is in engineering, the field most often associated with technological change, and we engineers have always had to be adaptive…
Australia faces major challenges across a range of industries, including manufacturing, infrastructure and energy. We need to prepare our young people for the jobs of the future.
The skills that engineers have always possessed – problem-solving, creativity, adaptability – are the skills we need to succeed moving forward. We need to invest in engineering, and educating the engineers of the future, to ensure that our country is best equipped to tackle the challenges that lie ahead: that our health, transportation and housing systems can sustain our growing population, and that we have reliable affordable electricity…
The shortage of engineering skills across the economy is clear in a report from Engineers Australia highlighting that last year there were 376,000 engineers in the labour force. That only 30 per cent were Australian graduates and 70 per cent were skilled migrants shows the significant gap to be addressed to encourage our young people in this field…
I agree that Australia’s economy would be in far better shape if it was focused around building genuine smart industries on the back of engineers, rather than ponzi-based financialised industries on the back of bankers.
That said, it’s hard to claim there are a shortage of engineering skills across the Australian economy when the Department of Employment’s own skills shortages report showed engineering professionals had the highest number of job applicants per position in 2015-16 (i.e. 48 job applicants per job):
If anything, the data suggests there is a massive oversupply of engineering professionals in Australia.
It’s also a bit rich to expect young Australians to study engineering when engineering is one of the most popular categories for skilled migrants, despite the massive oversupply gripping the industry:
The skilled migration system is precisely what is destroying career prospects for local engineering graduates.
Unless they plan to emigrate then why bother?
