If the experts are to be believed, engineering jobs are supposed to be among those least likely to be affected by the malaise that seems to drag down the rest of the U.S. employment market. Although many reasons have been advanced for the seemingly just-out-of-reachness of the traditional American full-time job, most are proposed with the understanding that they really shouldn't affect engineering of any kind, much less those jobs that not only require intense education, but certification and qualification on top of bankable industry experience. So how is the outlook for U.S. engineering jobs in 2016?
Although engineering is often seen as a difficult career to ship off to some faraway land, surprisingly it is not at the top of some “best jobs” lists. The reasons for this are varied and depend on what criteria are being evaluated to produce the designation of “best job.” From a pure reliability standpoint, health care still tops all lists, as it is increasingly clear there will be tremendous demand growth for trained professionals in all health care fields from medical to manufacturing.
Engineering positions at companies where high-intensity projects undergo a start and stop cycle are more and more becoming almost seasonal. Like the nomadic careers of game developers, both mechanical and aerospace engineers are finding themselves working when there's an active project, but unemployed after they succeed in delivering the product. This kind of desolate reward has a way of creating perverse disincentives among professionals to do a good job. At the same time it supposedly saves employers from paying a building full of people to wait until the next project is put into production.
The problem with the cyclical approach is it has a way of distorting the job and career numbers. If an employee is not working in March, but is working in February and April, are they actually unemployed or are they simply on unpaid leave? If they are on unpaid leave, does that mean there is no job growth? By the traditional measures, being on unpaid leave is the same as being unemployed. By some new metrics, perhaps that employee and others like them can be reclassified as “temporarily furloughed” or some such. Whether or not that will mitigate the true count of who does and does not have a job remains to be seen.
In a diffuse job market, those that combine skill with ambition are the ones likeliest to bring growth back to the employment market. One of the most exciting developments in both the engineering and manufacturing industries in the last five to ten years is 3D printing.
We have yet to fully realize the possibilities of what trained engineers can do with a device that allows them to go from idea to design to prototype to production-savvy manufacturing all in the same room over a weekend. The same kinds of advancements that grew out of the rapid application development technologies in software during the mid 1990s and early 2000s could easily find their way to 3D prototyping and micro-scale manufacturing.
The results could produce a fourth-generation industrial revolution that would completely overturn the mass production/mass manufacturing/mass media iron triangle that has driven business growth in first world countries for the last 150 years. This kind of development is what is required for engineers to truly see the kind of job and career growth they've traditionally enjoyed.
The micro-scale manufacturing revolution must produce the gains of tomorrow. The reason for this is quite simple. There is no road back from here. Even if the U.S. wanted to recapture the industrial might it once had, we no longer have the tools to build the heavy industry or the vehicles, machines and parts to construct it. The path forward sets those kinds of processes aside in favor of more advanced kinds of devices built by more advanced kinds of tools and more insightful design processes.
Future engineering must become lighter, quicker and more agile. With the new processes will come a completely different approach which will bring growth, sustainable economic dynamics and stable careers back to the U.S. and its job market.
