Engineering Hiring Crisis And What Educators Can Do About It?

August 10, 2022

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There is an acute hiring crisis across the planet today, particularly among engineers. The Fourth Industrial Revolution’s demands are expected to result in the creation of 133 million new employment opportunities in major economies by the year 2022, according to the World Economic Forum.

Today’s workforces are under increased stress due to economic and demographic changes. In order to prepare and enable the people of the world to thrive in the jobs of the future, we must also concentrate on achieving equitable, inclusive progress as we enter a new decade, which the United Nations and others have dubbed the “decade of delivery” for significant transitions to a more sustainable world.

For the industry, the COVID-19 outbreak has only made things more challenging. Older engineers have recently chosen to use their experience to shift to careers in consulting or teaching, leaving a gap that businesses are already finding difficult to fill.

In addition to this, there is an absence of engineering candidates who are capable and driven. Since they lack the technical knowledge and practical expertise needed to immediately assume a new position, younger, less experienced engineers are having a tough time. The younger generation is constantly looking for jobs in technology, finance, and architecture despite the rising demands of industries such as manufacturing or oil & energy.

It is a popular misperception that in order to succeed, we must all have very sophisticated technological or scientific expertise. Although working with technology will be vital, there is also an increasing need for humans to acquire specific abilities for interpersonal interactions. These include levels of intelligence for specific jobs in sales, human resources, care, and education, as well as interpersonal dynamics, teamwork, and creativity. The idea that clever technology will simply replace certain professions while creating new ones is equally naive. Since activities are evolving and worker capacities are being increased by machines, the biggest impact will really be a reconfiguration of employment. Instead of focusing on which jobs will survive, we should consider how roles will change and how intelligent technologies will impact duties.

Employers require help from education systems to develop talent pools with skills relevant to current business needs in order to close the skills gap problem. While some businesses have worked closely with educational partners to construct talent pipelines, the majority rely on educational systems to independently identify and develop the capabilities that the future workforce will need.

How exactly can educators help in resolving the global crisis?.

Through the process of developing their own projects, students learn a variety of skills and subject matter in project-based learning. There are occasions when these initiatives offer a fix for a real-world problem. The fact that students learn while creating something is what matters most in project-based learning, though. They collaborate in teams and offer their individual perspectives, skills, and ways of learning to the project.

Although giving the students on-the-job training would consume more time, to connect their students with real-world experiences, many prosperous engineering departments in high schools and colleges partner with regional apprenticeship and internship programmes. Your students can effectively acquire the hard and soft skills that companies value by doing this.

Giving your students certification assistance is a fantastic method to teach them technology specific skills. The acquisition of new technologies, abilities, and skills for a particular promotion is facilitated through certification. One can develop their profession by obtaining a new certification or an advanced certification in a certain field of expertise.

Students must have a strong résumé in order to get to the interview round. Students could find it difficult to describe how they would fit well on the team of an employer while showing their abilities. Writing resumes and doing interviews well requires practice, like other aspects of life. Educators could consider holding seminars to help students create their resumes and get ready for interviews.

What is required appears to be very clear: a joint initiative by business and educational leaders to develop the most crucial guidelines for the future of education, with the aid of comprehensive feedback from both sides. Leaders in education policy, university systems, and business must collaborate to develop a national “talent management” strategy in order to develop a competitive workforce as workforce demographics and skills continue to move quickly. We might potentially hope to close this expanding talent gap by proactively developing “changemaker” abilities like empathy, creativity, and leadership among present and potential employees as well as changing the educational system to deliver hard skills that are relevant to the market.

Westford Uni Online offers Executive MBA in Engineering Management and MBA with Engineering Management to facilitate employment and career growth for the engineers of today. The programmes of European quality education designed to instill knowledge and train professionals in the skillset requires to thrive in the current job market.