Haf: Yeah, times are great for oil and gas engineers in Houston and Edmonton. But boom times come and go on an industry by industry basis. The trouble is, whenever an industry is in a boom condition, the business associations lobby governments to "open the taps" on the supply of whatever they feel short of. They hit the media and cry about shortages of skilled workers. The trouble is, they become SILENT the second the boom times are over- nobody is left to turn off the tap again!
Just like you heard doom and gloom stories here about engineering prospects five years ago, for the past 20 years I've heard media stories warning of a dire and looming shortage in biotechnology, IT, hydrogen technology, oil and gas etc. While business continues to define "shortage" as "an inability to find ten qualified candidates with direct experience to choose between, within 1 week of looking, without offering any premium over industry average wages and benefits, without the need to train, and indeed willing to take a short-term contract position", then I guess we'll be in shortageland forever. Industry wants a "flexible" workforce: cheap, plentiful, cowed and willing to take work under the terms they dictate. And they expect these conditions to apply even to regulated professionals like engineers- and get annoyed and cry shortage whenever it isn't so.
Take the high-tech boom as an example. Ten years ago, when I was a poor unfortunate soul working as an environmental engineer, civ eng grads were crying to me for an opportunity to work for free to gain some experience. At the time, the "smart" ones did a 1-year course in Java programming or the like and found jobs far more lucrative and plentiful than civ eng was at the time. Unfortunately, 2001 came along, the IT boom was bust, and half of those kids were out of work with little hope of ever falling back on their civ eng degrees. And guess what- in 2006, consulting companies here are complaining that there's a shortage of civ engineers with 10 years of local market experience. Go figure!
I have neighbours down the street. Both were educated as chem engs, but neither of them are doing engineering of any kind. At current it's estimated that less than 50% of Canada's engineering grads go on to work as engineers. Yep, sounds like we have a desperate shortage of engineers in Canada, eh?!
Then consider that about 8-10,000 foreign-trained engineers settle in Toronto alone every year, compared with a Canadian bachelor's engineering graduate class of, you guessed it, 10,000! And then they wonder why so many of them end up driving taxicabs or doing other survival jobs to get by!
If you're smart, creative, have some communication skills in written and spoken English, and have an engineering degree, are willing to move to find a job, and have a reasonable work ethic, there won't be much trouble for you to find something to do for a living. But whether or not you find work suitable to your education, skills, aptitudes and interests, in a place you and your family would actually enjoy living in, for compensation levels which truly respect your professional status as an engineer- that's something which is strongly dependant on supply and demand.
Engineers who think that their sacred profession is somehow "above" supply and demand really p*ss me off. Damn it, for once I'd like to see a real, actual engineering shortage rather than one merely reported in the media!
