While exacerbated of late, Australia’s engineering skills shortage is far from a new problem. We need to act now before it’s too late.
When given the chance to speak at the Women in Engineering Summit 2022 last week, I chose to address one of the greatest challenges currently facing engineering in Australia – the staggering shortage of engineers.
While Australia as a whole has been beset by one of the worst skills shortages in recent history, the engineering sector has been hit particularly hard, with a 41% increase in engineering vacancies over the last 12 months.
Given our industry has significant numbers of overseas-born engineers, the closure of Australia’s borders during COVID-19 played a major role in the engineering skills deficit.
But, with a lack of support for skilled migrants once they arrive in Australia to help them find an engineering role, a declining interest in STEM studies and pervasive cultural issues in some sectors, the root of the problem goes much deeper.
Challenges in the classroom
Demand for engineers across most sectors is rapidly growing, but our research indicates that Australia’s population growth has exceeded the growth of supply of domestically trained engineers.
The STEM decline begins in our schools, as indicated by steady decline in the numbers of Australian school students studying intermediate and advanced-level maths in 2020.
It also doesn’t help that year 7 to 9 mathematics is largely taught by out-of-field teachers, and less than 40% of the students undertaking higher mathematics are female.
These issues flow onto tertiary education, with Australia recording the second-lowest number of engineering graduates compared to other disciplines among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
Of those who do undertake an engineering degree, around half stay the course, with many taking longer than four years to complete their studies.
Only a fraction of engineering students are female (16%), with even less going on to join the engineering workforce.
With the vast majority of our female engineers being overseas-born, we are simply not doing enough to engage women in the profession.
An issue of visibility
One of the key reasons women don’t chose engineering to begin with is a lack of awareness around what engineering is and what engineers do.
According to our recent 2022 Women in Engineering Research, when women do pursue engineering, most (80%) find their work dynamic and impactful, and agree that they bring a unique perspective to the table.
But despite this fulfilment in their work, the profession is losing women due to deep-seated cultural issues including lack of visibility, limited career opportunities, bullying and harassment.
It is little wonder why female engineers don’t seem to believe they deserve their success, with rates of imposter syndrome among this group far exceeding that of men in the profession or women in other fields.
Systemic problems preventing integration
Even before COVID-19 struck, there were several significant roadblocks preventing skilled migrants from entering the engineering profession.
With only 40% of skilled migrant engineers in Australia working in an engineering role, reduced immigration is just a small part of the problem.
Apart from a lack of local knowledge and experience, our 2021 research into the Barriers to employment for migrant engineers found extensive bias around perceived cultural differences, particularly when it comes to ‘soft’ skills.
When skilled migrants manage to overcome visa or sponsorship issues, a lack of local referees to vouch for their work, along with certification queries and ‘flight risk’ concerns are further barriers to employment. Given there is a tendency for organisations to hire from ‘networks’ for senior roles, skilled migrants are also locked out of the upper echelons of the profession.
Overcoming the issues
Addressing the ongoing engineering skills shortage requires a multi-level plan with short, medium and long term goals.
Building our skilled migrant workforce can help to fill the skills gap now. But this will require initiatives to match under-employed skilled migrant engineers with jobs, programs to assist industry with overseas engineering qualifications and visa information and partnerships with countries such India and Pakistan to bring surplus engineers to Australia.
Culture initiatives developed by organisations and industry bodies could improve the retention of women in the engineering workforce, including flexible working arrangements, equal provision of professional development opportunities, mentorship programs and initiatives to address imposter syndrome.
To build up the domestic pipeline of engineers in the long term, we need to generate interest in the profession among Australia’s youth. This could entail positive messaging about the impact engineers have in the world, and exploring the number of career opportunities that an engineering qualification can bring.
Engineering is a very mobile profession, with Australia’s involvement in the International Engineering Alliance (IEA) providing many opportunities to work overseas. People trained as engineers have a sought-after skillset and mindset (engineers have secured the top spot in the Australian Government’s Employer Satisfaction Survey (ESS) for the last two years), so it’s an ‘asset-for-life’.
Education-wise, maths, physics, technology and engineering studies must also be bolstered by making it easier for mid-career professionals to become teachers and changing the ATAR maths scaling rules so students are not disincentivised from studying intermediate and advanced-level maths.
If better financial and nonfinancial support was provided to engineering students, graduation rates and times might improve, with more graduates remaining in the profession. These support initiatives could include mentorship, internship and apprenticeship models and Commonwealth-supported places for two-year conversion Masters for science graduates.
When it comes to future workforce planning, initiatives must be developed to improve demand data and communication with supply channels. Establishing better communication systems between industry and universities is a good place to start.
With demand for engineering skills quickly outpacing supply, it’s clear that we have our work cut out for us. But with indications that the problem will get worse before it gets better, action needs to be taken now.
There is no engineering skills shortage in Australia. This myth has been bantered about in the press a lot lately, but it simply is not true.
The problems are a completely broken recruiting system, lazy people in management positions, and a widespread misunderstanding of how employment economics works.
I have yet to see a project that was fully funded and championed by committed stakeholders not go forward because the project couldn’t find enough engineering staff. There are plenty of engineers in Australia available to fill all the needed positions. In fact, the lower engineering salaries in Australia relative to its peer group countries is more aligned with an engineering skills surplus than a shortage.
Excellent Article by Jane McMaster.
As a Principal Oil & Gas Engineer having worked for Shell UK & more recently as Engineering Manager for Allara Energy & GHD in Brisbane, I have mentored many post graduates throughout my career.
However in the past few years less graduates are entering our Petrochemical sector. I agree it is imperative for Australia’s success that we make it attractive to employ overseas engineers which would go some way to solving the shortage.
This is very interesting. We have a young lady coming to our house to clean every week and she has an engineering degree from India. Just this afternoon my wife went to the optometrist and she said her husband was an architect/engineer who has been practicing in Qatar and since coming to Australia hasn’t been able to even get an interview. If my limited experience is representative there are a lot of people who are qualified and can’t find work. I have given the cleaning lady the names of a few dozen recruiters on LinkedIn but it seems a bit ad-hoc. I wonder if there is some way to connect work seekers with employers more directly? Could Engineers Australia play a role?
Glad that EA address it. Yet the industry will not change.
An over 10 year’s experience engineer apply for Senior Engineer.
Reply 1: We look for Australian Experience.
Reply 2: You have never been using PowerCAD before.
Apply for Junior positions.
Reply: You are overqualified
So get back to your Asian restaurant and work for cash.
Dear Ms MacMaster,
I have been involved with the Institute of Engineers from when I first attended their meetings in Adelaide in 1989. At that first meeting, a presenter stated that there was a chronic shortage of engineers in Australia due to a lack of teaching mathematics in high school, lack of migrant and female engineers and an overall lack of understanding in the community on what engineers did and how important they were. The proposals on how to address this, namely; encourage more students to study mathematics, encourage engineering migration and female engineering at university and advertise more seem to be identical to what you propose here. In fact, it is identical to what has been proposed by the Institute of Engineers over the last 30 years. Every year there is at least one article in this magazine that regurgitates this information.
I notice that also in this issue of Create, there is an article that states; ‘Conquering the world’s increasingly complex problems requires a high-skilled engineering workforce ready to innovate’. So my question to you is how is this Multi-level plan innovative?
What appears here is the same plan that has continuously failed over the last 3 decades and that does not address any of the core issues and problems that must be overcome if Engineering wishes to remain relevant for the next 30 years.
The Institute of Engineers need to stop trying to address issues that are outside of their control. You cannot control teaching maths at high school, engineering immigration, engineering retention in industry or the number of female engineers. You need to look at and acknowledge those deep seated issues within the institute that are hidden and never mentioned. Then, you need the courage, bravery and strength to tackle them. Fortunately, they are completely within the Institutes control and in some cases are because of neglect over the last 3 decades.
If you are open to listen and discover what these issues are, please respond.
There also needs to be a change in how we educate and train our future engineers. If, after up to 4 years of study, we are providing candidates into the profession who basically need to start again to learn the actual skills required for industry then we will continue struggle to raise awareness of what engineers do. If a plumber turned up and could not change a tap after completing an apprenticeship would we deem this acceptable? Combining the theoretical teaching from educational institutions, with the hands-on requirements of employer organisations into a more holistic and useable package of training should help address this as well as reducing the financial burden on students. My concern is that the monetisation of tertiary education will be a serious obstacle for this to happen.
Absolutely agree with this…
It’s great to see EA taking a lead role on this issue.
Can I suggest that a clearer explanation of the social and economic benefits from engineering would help? For example, we know that women opt for biomedical and environmental engineering in large numbers because the social benefits are more obvious. I have suggested moving away from the notion that “engineers are expert problem-solvers” towards the idea that
Engineers are people
… with specialized technical knowledge
… who conceive, deliver, operate and sustain artificial objects, systems and processes
… that enable people to be more productive,
to do more with less effort, time, materials, energy, uncertainty, health risk, and environmental disturbances.
Productivity improvement is essential if we are to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Most engineers today are unaware of the link between their work and productivity. That’s why I think that more emphasis on understanding the value contributed by engineers to society would be helpful.
Australia does not have an engineering skills shortage. This is a myth that the writers at “Create” continue to propagate. The data cited in this article are indicative of an engineering surplus, not a shortage. The problems often misrepresented as a skills shortage are a fundamentally broken recruiting system combined with a misunderstanding of how labour force economics works. Some articles are needed examining whether managers in corporations and government have considered what they are doing wrong that is preventing available Australian engineers from entering or returning to the workforce.
Thanks Jane. The points you make are sound. One observation in terms of initiatives to better support skilled migrant engineers into the Australian workforce. CareerSeekers (www.careerseekers.org.au) has a successful model to support refugees and asylum seekers with professional qualifications and work experience from their country of origin – many of whom are engineers – to restart their professional careers in Australia. We’ve worked with many hundreds of professionals from refugee backgrounds in the last few years to obtain paid professional internships, with more than 90% of them successfully converting their internship into ongoing professional work, bringing their skills, experience, resilience and loyalty to Australian employers. I realise this is just one small piece of the broader picture but there are elements of success we can build on to address this issue.