Engineers will have a strong advantage when it comes to future employment opportunities. This is due to the critical role that engineers will play in enabling the Australian economy to meet future challenges and remain internationally competitive.
According to Chris Stoltz, Engineers Australia Victorian President, there is an increasingly strong demand for graduates with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), given the highly technical nature of future economic growth.
“Our future lies in technology, so as a nation we need to encourage STEM education in order to best equip ourselves to deal with ever emerging new technologies and technical challenges,” he said.
“We’re not going to be able to produce modern communications systems and solve some of the infrastructure issues that environmental challenges and population growth will create with just generalist degrees.
“We need people who are technically trained – people who can build and design things as well as solve technical problems.”
Stoltz notes that engineers possess a more practical skill set that enables them to better adapt to fast changing job markets.
“Engineering as a career seems to survive the ups and downs of the job market much better,” said Stoltz. “The training that an engineer receives appears to equip them for a wider variety of jobs.”
“Structural engineers, for example, can easily turn their hands to other technical areas of employment that are engineering-related, such as contracts or building inspection.”
Stoltz’s opinion on the adaptable nature of engineering skills is vindicated by the Australia’s STEM Workforce report that was released in April by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Alan Finkel.
The report found that STEM professionals are working in a surprisingly diverse range of roles across the Australian economy.
“Studying STEM opens up countless job options and this report shows that Australians are taking diverse career paths,” said Finkel, whose own background lies in electrical engineering.
Those engineers who would prefer to remain within their original field of expertise will continue to enjoy a broad range of job opportunities, particularly from the ongoing infrastructure development needed to make Australia a competitive modern economy.
“If you look around Australia at the moment all sorts of major infrastructure projects are being discussed – you’ve got tunnelling projects, roads and bridges, as well as ship-loading wharfs,” said Stoltz.
“Not only do we need people with technical skills to design things, we also need people with practical technical skills to perform the actual construction work.”
Perhaps the most current example of the engineering-related employment opportunities that a major infrastructure project can generate is the National Broadband Network (NBN), which will provide almost all of Australia with faster and more stable Internet connections.
The NBN will generate major employment demand in the immediate future, with plans already afoot to provide training to thousands of much-needed workers.
“For the NBN they’re saying that we need another 4000 people trained to actually construct the project,” said Stoltz. “A lot of that training is in the civil construction area, so it’s not just training university graduates, it’s training people who can actually do the stuff that professional engineers design.”
To learn more about the skills engineers will need in the future and to keep up to date with the needs of the profession, Engineering Education Australia offer a range of technical, business and project management courses delivered via a public schedule or in-house.