While recent news about the engineering labor force has been grim, experts say that unemployed engineers should not lose hope about future job prospects in the pump or related industries. In this current challenging time, unemployed engineers can look to growing industries for potential employment and consider the prospect of job openings in more established industries in the future.
For workers who have suffered layoffs due to the down economy, the good news is that certain engineering disciplines are currently in need of skilled workers. "There is a huge and growing demand for energy engineers, and the pipeline just cannot fill them fast enough," says Carl Vieth, a faculty associate in the Department of Engineering's professional development division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). "We are seeing it as well in some of the civil engineering disciplines, especially water engineering and geotechnical engineering, where if I had 1,000 of those engineers I could employ them all tomorrow," he says.
Bob Parks, human resources manager at Grundfos Pumps Corporation, agrees that certain fields will soon require many skilled engineers, particularly when the Recovery Act goes into full effect."When you see the potential for large infrastructure spending, it can lead to a little more labor pressure as firms continue to grow. It can be a little more challenging to find engineers."
These views are welcome news in contrast to the engineering job employment numbers released in April 2009. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate for engineers rose from 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 to 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Among engineers, mechanical engineers were hit hardest, suffering an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent (up from 2.1 percent in the previous quarter).
These numbers do not address the upcoming employment challenges in more established industries. In those industries, the engineering workforce will see massive numbers of experienced, knowledgeable workers retire in the next five to 10 years. The National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 (SEI) reports that 26 percent of science and engineering degree holders in the workforce are 50 years old or older. The number of aging workers is particularly pronounced in certain industries, including oil and gas. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the average age of oil and gas workers is 51, and more than half of the oil and gas workforce will retire by 2015.
Industry leaders feel that even given the present state of the economy, the upcoming retirement of Baby Boomer workers will have widespread effects on industries that are already shedding workers at an alarming rate. "I see no impact from the current economy that lessens this very real issue," says Dean Douglas, president and CEO of Peerless Pump. "In fact, it may heighten it. During tough and turbulent times, the availability of talent is even more critical to a company's performance as you position yourself to succeed in spite of the challenges and take whatever action is necessary to ensure you are in an even stronger position when the economy bounces back-which it always does."
With the current and upcoming challenges in the engineering labor market, training workers-those in the workforce and those set to enter the workforce-will be essential to the long-term health of the industry.
Educational Innovations for Engineering Students
Training the next generation is important for the industry's viability as more workers retire. Universities must focus efforts on producing better qualified engineers who can work productively in the field, urges Vieth. One way to produce more qualified candidates is to encourage students to take more internships and co-ops (semester-long or year-long internships), he says.
To produce graduates who are ready to join the workforce, engineering programs in the future may follow the example of the Center for Manufacturing Excellence (CME), a new engineering program in the planning stages at the University of Mississippi. According to James Vaughan, interim director of the CME, the program will "produce a new type of person to go into the manufacturing world. An engineer who not only has a solid engineering background but also understands the language and the skill set needed for business, accounting, etc."
Part of the emphasis in the program includes practical work experience on a planned 12,000 sq ft manufacturing factory floor in the new CME building. The program will also include opportunities for students to work with business and accounting students in a workplace scenario. This curriculum is designed to complement, not replace, the traditional theory-focused engineering education. "We could give them 128 hours of pure technical engineering background, but we don't think that is going to produce the best person," Vaughan asserts. "We are trying to create the environment that they are actually working in a company."
The goal is that programs like the CME will produce better qualified engineers with more experience who can work productively after graduation.
How Companies Are Training Workers
With Baby Boomers retiring in the future, companies "have to think about ways to engage this very talented group of individuals who carry around a lot of knowledge in their heads and transfer that knowledge to the next generation," explains Vieth.
Some companies are successfully partnering older workers with newer workers as a way of passing on knowledge. Susan Schmitt, senior vice president of human resources at Rockwell Automation, explains that the system involves taking "an experienced and seasoned employee, who knows the company, knows how our organizational matrix works and understands how to get things done in our company and asking this person to mentor a new employee." This partnering system is an effective way to keep some of the skills knowledge of the older generation in-house and is also a way to engage some of the workers who had planned to retire soon and may have to wait given the economy's effect on retirement savings.
Replacing retiring workers can take time, explains Parks. "A highly specialized design engineer may take a couple of years to really get up to the performance level of the previous engineer," he says. "Take a strong product generalist that works in application engineering; it could take several months for a non-experienced worker to become productive and a couple of years to when they are performing at a very high level."
Despite the time investment required, industry leaders say it is possible to transfer the knowledge of retiring workers to new workers. Grundfos, for example, had to cope with the problem internally when it moved its sales company from Fresno, Calif., to the Kansas City area in 2001.
"We lost a tremendous number of our intellectual capital because of people who did not want to move with the company," Parks explains. "We have been able to rebuild a sizeable amount of that workforce with high quality individuals. . . We have worked hard as a company to make sure we are documenting processes and continuously training and developing our employees. We rely on some of the more seasoned and senior people within the organization to help with both of those processes."
When it comes to retaining younger workers in the engineering workforce, on-boarding and professional development programs have proven essential to lowering voluntary turnover. Schmitt explains that an orientation program can make the difference in helping employees feel comfortable within a new organization. "We were losing some of our new employees at faster rates than people who had been here longer," she says. "We had a big opportunity to do a better job with on-boarding new people." Better communication and orientation when employees start has translated into improved new employee retention, according to Schmitt.
Schmitt also explains that new graduates who start at her company enter a two-year leadership development program. "It is essentially a rotational program in which the recent college graduates are assigned to work a six-month rotational assignment-to help them understand that part of the business," she says. "They will do four of those assignments over two years. It is an effective way to quickly ramp up people's knowledge about a fairly complex organization and industry. It has certainly helped us to reduce turnover and train new employees about how to be successful in our company."
Outside the United States, companies like Flowserve are finding that workers are available but also require training to gain needed experience. Andy Beall, president of Flowserve's Flow Solutions Division, cites a new refinery in Vietnam that needs workers, but no experienced refinery workers are in the local area. Establishing local training programs can be essential to the health of a project. "You have a lot of smart, capable, enthusiastic, energetic people, but they do not have the experience," Beall says. "The opportunity is to attract talent and then have a structured program, like Flowserve's Rotating Equipment Specialist Program, so that these people come up to speed very quickly."
Beall says in the United States there is "good talent, there is just not enough to go around. In other places in the world, there is no experienced talent available."
Overall, training can make the difference for a company's-and the industry's-long term health.
Looking Forward
With the number of skilled engineers looking for a job in the down economy and the numbers set to retire, Shannon Lassiter, North American recruiting manager for Sulzer Pumps, urges companies to recruit for the future. "Great recruiting strategies are not static; they flex and change with economic conditions and competitors' actions," he says. "Now is when recruiters need to be forecasting future economic and business growth. Talk with your engineering managers and study industry trends to forecast when the economic downturn for your company might end. Having a strong recruiting function is essential if the company is to recover from the economic doldrums. Take those resumes that are now rolling in and begin the process of preparing for the future."
Parks agrees. "I do believe that the pump industry, as a group, can look to ways to identify our industry as an exciting, growing industry for people to be a part of," he says. "As the world grows, water becomes more of a critical resource. Having bright, highly talented, innovative people within all of our organizations is going to be vital as we confront these challenges here in the United States and abroad in the future."
Pumps and Systems, June 2009