Dannym
Lets see, you want your children to go into a profession where they will be satisfied emotionally and financially but wish to keep your fellow engineers, who want out, in a profession where they cannot achieve emotional and financial satisfaction?
My statement was not meant to be callous. I once hired a junior engineer, right out of university, who decided before lunch on his first day that he did not want to be an engineer. He only went into engineering because of family pressures. He hated every minute of engineering school and was depressed at spending the rest of his life at something that he just couldn’t get excited about. I felt sorry for him and we had a long talk about it. He really wanted to be an accountant and left saying that that was what he was going to do.
Are you saying that he should have been kept in the profession for some reason?
Here in Manitoba, the professional association is quite cognizant of the financial aspects of the profession. They consider it part of their mandate to protect the public through the regulation of engineering, to include overseeing the profession and helping ensure that it can continue to attract and retain the type of people who will make the profession a better place.
In furtherance of this they are visiting the first year classes and providing them some numbers about the various disciplines and the projected demand and demographics in the profession. They sponsor having engineers visit high school classes to talk to seniors about engineering. They promote the profession in various other ways.
Also here in Manitoba the pharmacy profession is highly regulated by their society. They severely limit the number of people entering the school of pharmacy and thus tightly control the numbers of new pharmacists in the province. The result is that there is a serious shortage of pharmacists in the province. Starting salaries are around twice that of new engineers. Rural pharmacies are closing because there are not enough pharmacists to go around and the smaller pharmacies are unable to support them.
Who loses in this situation? Not the pharmacists, their salaries are growing. It’s the public, the very people who our ethics says we should put first. They cannot get adequate medical care because of the shortage.
Engineering, at least in Canada has chosen to allow as many people to enter the profession as the universities can train and as can become qualified. They then let market demands set salaries and in a capitalistic economy that is the way it should be.
Rhodie
If there is no demand for your rather expensive services then I see you as having three choices.
Firstly you could lower your price. You may not want to or may think that you are worth more but the market has spoken and your services are not worth what the market is willing to pay. Sorry, but that appears to be the hard truth.
Secondly you could change the services that you offer. If there were no demand for industrial, how hard would it be for you to become a mechanical? Aren’t the first couple of years common in both disciplines?
Thirdly you could change where you offer your services. If the demand is for engineers somewhere else then you may have to move.
I realize that none of these are easy or desirable choices. It’s a fact of life in the new economy that no career is set for life. I’ve been an engineer for 26 years and moved 5 times, held 7 jobs, been laid off 3 times and spend most of the last ten years away from home. (That is counting the 10 years on my own as one job. If I counted projects the total would be over 20 jobs.)
You can bemoan the fact that the old economy has gone but you still have to make a life in the new economy. If you cannot accept the new facts of life then the new economy will pass you by. If you can adapt then there are opportunities out there, you just have to go and find them.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion