Companies get creative to overcome engineer shortage

Even after one of worst recessions in history, Corridor employers say a good engineer is still hard to find.

“It is a generic shortage across the board,” said Larry Hanneman, engineering career services director at the Iowa State University College of Engineering. “The biggest driving force going forward is the tremendous attrition due to (baby) boomer retirements.”

Demand for engineers slowed in Eastern Iowa around 2008, when the region's economy began to feel the effects of the national recession, Hanneman said. But interest has shown signs of making a strong comeback.

“The number of employer visits to (ISU's) campus for engineering was up 48 percent in spring of 2011 over spring of 2010,” he said. “The number of visits from Iowa employers was up 38 percent.”

Aerospace defense work is one of the largest shortage areas because of the number of engineers who entered the field from the baby-boom generation, at a time when the country's space race lent status and stature to the profession. Many of those aerospace defense engineers are now working past normal retirement age and are expected to begin retiring in droves, Hanneman added.

Cedar Rapids-based Rockwell Collins is the state's largest employer of aerospace defense engineers, and one of the largest employers of electrical and software engineers. Its director of talent acquisition, Stephen Schulz, calls it a “perfect storm” for engineer recruitment.

In addition to boomer retirements, Schulz said the United States just isn't creating as many engineers as it once did, and is falling behind nations such as Russia, China and India in the number of engineers it educates. Hollywood doesn't entice young people to engineering the way it does to fields such as pysicians, lawyers and crime scene investigators.

“It's not an easy challenge,” Schulz said.

Providing internships to engineering students is the meat and potatoes of Rockwell Collins's programs to recruit entry-level engineers - so much so that Rockwell Collins won't disclose the percentage of vacancies filled in that way. Internships give the employer and employee a chance to evaluate each other, college placement officials say, and can even give the student strong indications whether they'll be happy working full-time in the field.

Rockwell Collins has a high school internship program, and Schulz said many large engineer employers have placed a strong emphasis on “establishing name identification” with high schoolers interested in engineering. Rockwell Collins supports a number of programs that support education in STEM - science, technology, engineering and math - the core academic backgrounds required.

Companies such as Rockwell Collins once relied on help wanted advertisements in newspapers and, later, Internet job boards, to find applicants. Paid recruiters and social networking sites are playing a bigger role in Rockwell Collins's recruitment effort, Schulz said.

Hiring recruiters and buying tables at college job fairs can be effective, said Serena Ward, human resources manager for Cedar Rapids-based civil engineering company Ament Inc. But they're also costly at a time when business is a little slow.

Ward said MyTernNow, a Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce website, allows employers to post video of their own staff members talking about the work they do, their company and where they live. Ward believes the website will be a successful long-term recruiting tool because it allows job-seekers to learn about the company at their leisure without the pressures of talking to a recruiter.

Tina Keuter, human resources manager

at Shive-Hattery, recalled recently having six position postings, two of them for engineers and the remainder support positions. The length of time required to fill empty slots depends on the level of experience, specialty and certification required.

And yet, a shortage

Despite what's widely regarded as an engineering shortage, employers acknowledge that many veteran engineers have difficulty finding employment. That's partly because there are so many different engineering specialties, and a shortage in one area could be unaffected by a glut of engineers in another area.

Skill obsolescence can be a problem for veteran engineers, especially if they've been out of work for extended periods.

Schulz said software engineers and systems developers make up one of the biggest demand categories at Rockwell Collins, as so many new technologies are enabled by software.

At ISU, “the strength of demand is going to be on the computer engineering side,” Hanneman said, with 86 percent of recent ISU engineering grads in computer engineering having “favorable outcomes” - meaning a job offer or acceptance to a graduate school.

“The weaker side has been civil and to some degree chemical as well,” Hanneman said.