Where Did All the Civil Engineers Go? 9

[Sparkette]

Though I am not myself a civil engineer I work with civil engineers. I was talking to one this morning who is driving between two offices an hour apart to work on three projects! I know there are those among you who have worked on more than that at one time so please don't regale me with your own tales of tribulation. I see how hard it is on this guy.

According to this civil engineer there is a distinct shortage of civil engineers. My question is, where are the civil engineers? Why aren't college students electing CivE as a profession?

 

[ccor]

Depends on what you mean by environmental work. I think water and wastewater is going pretty good, and will continue to grow. Environmental remediation and air pollution are tough fields right now.

 

[Zambo]

bimr,

I think you misunderstood my comments. I do not doubt the quality of the educational establishments in Malaysia, I am working with very good Malaysian engineers. My point is that as countries economies grow there is often a shortage of engineers not due to the quality, but rather the quantity of educational establishments.

Your comments regarding the Malaysia are incorrect as it is not a third world economy. Malaysia is a rapidly developing country with a strong economy and good infrastructure.

If you read the local papers in Malaysia you will see that Malaysia is expanding overseas and companies have work in India, Dubai, Qatar - to name a few. There is becoming a shortage of engineers. I believe the same will be true in India and China, this has already been experienced in Thailand and Singapore.

 

[bimr]

Zambo,

Don't think I misunderstood anything. Who said anything about quality? I just said you can get an equal education in most of these countries for just a tenth of what you paid for yours.

And I don't make up definitions such as "third world". Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, except for their big cities, their maquiladora-type production facilities, a small middle class and a much smaller ruling elite should be considered Third World countries as well, since their populations are overwhelmingly rural, agrarian and poor.

For the most part these countries are turning out an excess of college graduates and flooding the market. Many of the workers are forced to go to other countries as "guest workers" if they want to be employed.

It is just Economics 101. Ask yourself what happens to wages when the supply of workers exceeds the demand.

 

[Zambo]

bimr,

think we have wandered off-topic on this.

Do you really think Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have similar economies? It's like comparing Germany, Hungary and Romania - just because they're close together doesn't automatically mean that the economies are similar.

By the way I didn't know what maquiladora meant. I looked it up on the internet and I think you have chosen the wrong word. The economies you have chosen as your examples are different from each other and the internal demand for goods varies much between say Thailand and Indonesia.

 

[bimr]

Based on GDP, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have similar economies. Those countries are much more alike than Germany, Hungary and Romania are.

I actually posted "maquiladora-type" as these production facilitys are similiar to maquiladora. A maquiladora (or maquila) is a factory, that imports materials and equipment on a duty-free and tariff-free basis for assembly or manufacturing and then re-exports the assembled product usually back to the originating country.

Economy Indonesia
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$3,700 (2005 est.)

Thailand
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$8,300 (2005 est.)

Malaysia
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$10,400 (2005 est.)

Germany
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$29,800 (2005 est.)

Hungary
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$16,100 (2005 est.)

Romania
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$8,400 (2005 est.)



The bottom line is that there are numerous engineers and other college graduates in these countries. Many of them are underemployed. What is lacking is capital.

 

[francesca]

From those numbers, Zambo's analogy seems apt. Of course there's more to a country's "economy" than GDP per capita.

I was born, raised, educated and started my career in a third world country. When I started out, the company had just finished laying off half their staff because the boom of an Olympic bid turned to a bust in the aftermath of not getting the project. People were fired on a last in-first out basis, except for the few who had been supported by the company through college and were now repaying their bursaries. Later, bursary students were relieved of their obligations. This situation was not unique to my company. One of my top-performing class-mates was unemployed for three months after graduating, not for lack of trying.

The situation has reversed now, as more and more professionals move to Australia, New Zealand, England and the US, leaving behind the legacy of crime left to us by the poor minority government that chose torture and propaganda over education and services for the majority. Brain drain has caused a shortage of technical professionals, far more so than the growing economy.

When I did work back home, I was given far more responsibility than in the UK and to an extent in the US too. The analogy described to me is this: in a third world country, a 25 mile road construction project will have one resident engineer. In the UK it'll have one resident engineer per mile.

Professionals are underutilized in the UK and also in the US. What third world engineer does his own drafting? The company I'm working for this summer is a small office of a large company. They have two transportation engineers and not a single technician. They're looking to hire a graduate engineer, presumably because they need someone to do their CAD.

I don't know about you, but I didn't do all that calculus to draw pretty lines in CAD. I learned how to solve problems and find answers so that I could sweat the big stuff and pass on the little stuff to others.

 

[bimr]

francesca,
I am sure that it probably feels like there are inspectors every mile on your projects.

However, because labor is so cheap in the rest of the world, you are going to have many more people working on a project in developing countries.

For example, a fertilizer plant located in UK has 600 employees. Same fertilizer plant in Mexico has 2,400 employees.

Another example. I recall seeing armed guards at many facilities and buildings. The armed guards are not there because of high crime rates; the guards are there because you can hire them for almost nothing.

 

[Victor81]

Good day. I'm new here. And responding to your question, is easy to know that there are places in the world where people are not interested as much to commit to a hard working career such as this.

But there's still hope. In my country, there are many people that study this. I'm from Dominican Republic.