IEEE sounds the alarm, but the situation might be less bleak than it seems
According to Wanda Reder, president of theIEEE Power & Energy Society, the Green Economy development plan of US president Barack Obama will be impossible to effect due to a shortage of electrical engineers. In response to this, IEEE founded the U.S. Power and Energy Engineering Workforce Collaborative. This workgroup published its first report in April, drawing a very dark picture of the situation. Though the authors clearly have some good arguments, one must wonder if the situation is really as bad as they make it out. In the past, workforce shortages in certain professional domains have usually been solved automatically by the law of supply and demand.
(http://www.leonardo-energy.org/green-economy-risk-due-engineer-shortage)
Engineer Shortage Puts Green Economy and Smart Grid at Risk
Amy Fischbach
April 21, 2009 — As a cornerstone of his energy, environment and economic plans, President Barack Obama urges the country to transform its energy system to make it greener and smarter. But a growing shortage of electric power and energy engineers will make the path to reaching that vision rocky. Due to the aging electrical engineering workforce and educators, there may not be enough engineering support to design, build, operate and maintain the kind of reliable electric energy system that is required in the future.
(http://blog.tdworld.com/briefingroom/2009/04/21/engineer-shortage-puts-green-economy-and-smart-grid-at-risk/)
There seems to be the same problem everywhere in the world!!! Yes, here, too at PTM, we are running out of electrical engineers!!! Young ones especially. For 6 years we could not recruit any young electrical engineers and this April, there came only one guy finally, but he is so young (21!!) that he has a long way to go still.
So my boss and I went engineer-hunting to this tech-college in Tokyo the other day. There was a job fair at this college that some medium-small companies gathered together to have interview with the Senior students, who have not found jobs yet.
It is a pitty that those students in electrical department do not know how precious, valuable, worthwhile they are...they are so-called "golden eggs" to us, who are desparately looking for electrical engineers. All of the students we interview, well only 5 or 6 though, did not have any clue what we do, what MEP consulting engineers are. We were so eager to explain about our jobs to those students...we would have kidnapped them literally, but we tried not to...haha.
I was very anxcious to know if any of those guys were insterested in the job. Then some days later, one student came to our office to check out the working environment (which we could not really pround of...). This was the boy (to me, he is a boy...) that my boss and I really liked when we met at the job fair. We thought this would be our one-way love, but it was not. He is very much interested in our job!!!
I used to think, even though I majored political science in educational administration in Grad school, that it has something to do with the Japanese government...it should be all their fault that we lack better science/math education at school so that there is this engineer shortage. But since this is happening many many places in the world, who's fault it this? Why are we running out of electrical engineers then?
I am sure there should be many mixed reasons for each situation in each country, maybe not only on education level, but also some other reasons. Maybe I can find out the background sometime, but I do not have those gutts anymore after I left Grad school...I am now too lazy to do those researches!
Do anyone know why and how we can fix this problem
Are you engineers?
