In the midst of difficult economic times, some people think the field of engineering is contracting. Many high school students and their parents believe the engineering industry has little to offer in terms of career potential.
The truth, however, is exactly the opposite.
"There are huge futures in engineering. People are getting jobs, and they're getting good-paying jobs," said Robert Van Til, professor of industrial and systems engineering at OU. "These are also jobs with tremendous potential for advancement."
While it is true that opportunity for unskilled labor is shrinking rapidly, the need for highly skilled workers remains strong. In fact, many companies are scrambling to find both working engineers and college interns looking to move into many branches of engineering. The greatest concentration of this demand lies outside the traditional engineering realm of manufacturing.
"We have far more requests for interns than we can fill, and our graduates are being hired as fast as we can graduate them," said Michael Polis, chair of OU's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. "We're seeing pretty good demand."
In recent local and national news coverage, a number of articles have revealed that industry's need for engineers – particularly computer, electrical, civil, mechanical and industrial and systems engineers – is reaching record levels. US News and World Report, for example, described what analysts predict will be a long-term boom as "a resurgence in manufacturing not seen since the 1970s."
Part of the reason for this, Van Til explained, is that many companies had begun focusing on building efficiencies into their manufacturing and organizational processes prior to the recession hitting. "It was because of the improved processes being put in place that many manufacturers were able to weather the storm," he said.
Polis stressed that demand for engineers and others in the technical fields will certainly fluctuate with the state of the economy, and that there's no guarantee that demand will be high at the time a graduate is looking to enter the market. Still, he said, "Even in the worst of times, there has been hiring in engineering and, historically, the worst of times generally doesn't last too long."
As such, Polis and others suggest that if students have a strong interest in the engineering sciences, they should consider what the demand for engineers has been and is likely to be over time. Additionally, they should look into the many industries – such as health care, hospitality, logistics and retail – that have recently begun hiring engineers to help improve broad-scale product and service delivery systems.
Kathy Livelsberger, assistant director of career services at Oakland, said another important thing students should consider – no matter what industry they're looking to enter – is that the want-ad paradigm for job seeking is disappearing. Instead, the most successful candidates are finding opportunity through student internships and career networking.
"Job seeking is a science. You have to have an effective method and you need to build your skills," she explained. Livelsberger noted that particularly in the technical fields, employers now consider the completion of student internships an unspoken job pre-requisite, and one that will often take precedence over scoring the highest marks in the classroom.
Additionally, employers expect applicants to be able to articulate their accomplishments and what they can contribute to an organization. Because it is difficult for many job seekers to talk about the skills and experience that they have, Livelsberger said the Career Services office at OU places a strong emphasis on helping students and graduates to develop that ability.
Some industry analysts have speculated that the current shortage of engineers, combined with the popular perception that there are few jobs out there for future engineers, will lead to a crisis-level shortage in the not-so-distant future.
"The message that there is opportunity in this field needs to prevail," Livelsberger said. "We just can't afford to have people scared out of the profession because of what the market happens to be doing on a particular day."
To learn more about engineering and computer science programs at Oakland University, visit
oakland.edu/secs.
