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Dynamics of engineering jobs, evolving competence needs

M Rokonuzzaman | February 19, 2019 00:00:00


Often wealth creation capacity of a country is linked to the density of engineering graduates. Invariably, most of the developing countries have far less engineering graduates than their advanced counterparts. To address the disparity of this development indicator, many South Asian countries have geared up efforts to produce increasing number of engineering graduates. As a result, according to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, among the top 10 engineering graduate producing countries of the world, Vietnam and Indonesia have shown up. But in many south Asian countries, including India, more than 80 per cent of engineering graduates are failing to get jobs requiring innovative skill sets. Such reality is often creating a depressing impression -- jobless engineering graduates and worthless degrees.

There has been a growing concern that academic institutions are simply failing to produce quality graduates. And this concern has been getting worse day by day. It does not necessarily mean that these countries are suffering from the erosion of academic capacity, starting from curricula, classrooms, textbooks, faculty members and laboratories. Often they follow curricula, including lecture materials and textbooks of the world's best performing engineering programmes. But why is there a growing concern regarding the quality of engineering education, erosion of the market value of graduates, and unemployment? It's also quite puzzling to observe that upon migrating to advanced countries, many of these unemployable graduates often succeed in building sound engineering careers.

What do engineers do? Often the answer is simple. They know science and technology and apply that competence in analysing problems, designing optimum technology solutions, developing software, supervising the fabrication, configuring systems, and testing the performance. Does it mean that to address the quality of engineering education, we should keep honing the science, math, and technology knowledge base of engineering education? Often, data of advanced countries create misleading conclusion though. To have an appropriate context in analysing the situation, it might be worthwhile to look into different categories of engineering jobs and the respective competence needs.

There are basically three major types of engineering jobs: 1. an in-house employee of technology using organisations, both public and private, 2. working as or for contractors, and 3. innovating technological solutions in a globally connected, competitive economy. As an in-house employee, whether in the corporate IT departments, or government organisations, technology competence appears to be the primary capability to excel. But to succeed as contractors, engineering graduates need to have additional competence. They need to compete in the creative space in conceiving solutions, estimating resources, and negotiating to succeed in bidding for winning contracts. In delivery stage, they need to succeed in managing resources, dealing with risks associated with technologies, evolving requirements and others, nurturing and harnessing team competence, communicating with stakeholders, and participating in creative problem solving, among others. To succeed in innovation, these graduates need to manage the journey of analysing the problems of potential customers, conceiving likely solutions, managing risks of making investment, mobilising risk capital, forecasting technology and competition, assessing likely policy dynamics, and building teams -- among others -- in order to generate revenue from the technology and engineering competence.

Over the last 100 years, the relative availability of jobs in these three broad categories has been shifting. In the early decades of the 20th century, most of the engineering jobs involved working as in-house employees. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, almost all the computer science graduates used to work as in-house programmers of large employers. Technology competence used to be the dominating attribute of engineering skill set. But at the dawn of the 21st century, it appears that innovation is the major source of employment for engineering graduates. In order to succeed in taking ideas to market in generating profitable revenue, engineering graduates must have additional competency. They need to deal with the challenges of taking a series of rational decisions over a prolonged period of time in the midst of uncertainty. Uncertainty originates from multiple sources including uncertainty of technology progression, the arrival of competition, the emergence of substitution, changing as well as untested customer preferences, and unpredictable as well as unfavourable policy dynamics.

As jobs of engineers are shifting from working as in-house employees to contractors, ultimately leading to innovators, reputed engineering programmes across the globe are increasing general education components in curricula. There has been a trend in developing countries to follow those curricula. Reputed engineering accreditation programmes are recommending even 45 credits out of 130 total credits in general education, to prepare graduates for the innovation economy. As a result, these programmes are not offering enough scope to graduating students to acquire hands-on expertise in technology. On the other hand, due to the availability of modular solution, often diploma graduates are succeeding in integrating them. Without having a strong theoretical background in comparison to university graduates, in designing, building, deploying and configuring engineering solutions like a campus-wide computer network, often graduates of poly-technique institutions are outperforming engineering graduates. As a result, universities upon following highly reputed curricula are failing to produce competent graduates to work as in-house employees, or even for contractors.

On the other hand, due to the lack of mindset, social capacity, appropriate public policies, risk capital finance, lead users and research capabilities, engineering graduates from developing countries are failing at an alarming rate to pursue innovation through start-ups. A recent study has found that more than 90 per cent start-ups in India are failing to stay afloat beyond three years. On the other hand, innovation rich ecosystems in Europe, North America and China have been offering opportunities to engineering graduates to pursue career in innovation as opposed to seeking jobs as in-house employees or working for contractors.

Developing countries are producing an increasing number of engineering graduates by following their advanced counterparts. But there has been a gap between job creation capacities of these countries. Moreover, due to technology change, there has been changing dynamics of engineering jobs and competence needs. On one hand, by following globally reputed curricula, developing countries are producing engineering graduates who are finding themselves less competent than diploma graduates in undertaking in-house jobs, or working for contractors. On the other hand, due to the weakness in the innovation ecosystem, these graduates are alarmingly failing in pursuing opportunities in start-up space. As opposed to just increasing the supply of engineering graduates by following globally reputed curricula, it's time for developing countries to have better synchronisation between engineering education and economic as well as social capacities of engaging graduates to create wealth and jobs.

M Rokonuzzaman Ph.D is academic and rearcher on technology,

innovation and policy. [email protected]


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