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US Predicts Zero Job Growth For Electrical Engineers (bls.gov)
dcblogs writes: An occupation long associated with innovation, electrical and electronics engineering, has stopped growing, according to the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an update of its occupational outlook released Friday, said that the number of people employed as electrical and electronics engineers is now at 316,000, and will remain mostly unchanged for the next decade. The government put the 10-year job outlook for electronic and electrical engineers at "0% — little or no change." The IEEE-USA said the BLS estimates "are probably correct."
Job creation at zero means there are no new jobs created. If someone replaces a worker in a job, that's still only one job, not a new job.
Technological innovation serves to reduce the labor required to produce a product. Jobs grow when we reduce scarcity: with 1,000,000 acres of land and hunter-gatherer society, you can only hunt so many deer and collect so many berries; go agrarian and you can get 10 times as much food; and bring it up to modern agricultural practices and genetically-modified crops and you can take that to 70 times as much. Don't believe me? The optimistic projection for hunter-gatherer society is a maximum of 135 million humans supported before exhausting all resources and incurring mass famine; our modern agricultural practice feeds over 7,000 million humans.
Reduce scarcity. If you have 1,000,000 acres of arable land, you'll expend the same amount of labor to farm each acre, the same amount of labor to feed each new person. When you run out of arable land, you have to expend extra labor to transport water for irrigation, to manufacture fertilizer, and to harvest smaller yields. That means instead of 10 hours to feed one person, you have to expend 20 hours. That's where scarcity comes from: we can continue to expand, but we'll have to pour in more human labor, meaning we have to pay these people, which means the cost of goods goes up, which means standard-of-living falls and some people just don't have anything to trade (notably, currency) to buy enough food to live.
In markets, reducing the labor that goes into a product reduces its cost, reducing its minimum price, enabling us to sell that product to more of the consumer market. As the price comes down, existing consumers end up with more money in their pockets, and can buy new goods. Producing more of a good and producing a new good both require labor, which creates new jobs for the ones we displace by lowering labor costs.
That only holds us at an equal number of jobs. When you become capable of scaling up further without incurring more than a proportional increase in labor, you create more jobs: you can make more units without increasing the cost-per-unit. That's often accompanied by an increase in population, which creates more jobs.
In politics, you look at unemployment rate when consumer markets recover from a rapid job depletion, pointing out the lowering of the marginal unemployment. You look at number of jobs created and pointedly avoid mentioning unemployment rate when scarcity decreases, creating more jobs but also creating more total unemployed, managing to not affect the unemployment rate in the process.
Given all that, a stagnation of job creation in EE doesn't necessarily mean we're not innovating; we may be innovating new analysis methods which require fewer EEs, thus shifting their labor away.
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Don't study EE. That's what you do about it. Aparently EE labour becomes cheaper in Asia. But not only that, more importantly IMO is that the engineering takes place where the factories are. From a market viewpoint it makes sense to integrate both design, developing, testing and manufacturing. Just let them do all the work from start to finish over there, because it will cut down on the time it takes to develop and ship out new products. The mass market industry of consumer appliances nowadays is all about increasing the frequency of new products.
China has a thieving industry of original design manufacturers (ODMs)
Fixed that for you.
Sure, there is zero percent growth. But rest assured companies will argue that they still can't find any qualified workers and require H1B Visa holders to be imported and paid a meager $65K a year, rather than the $110K/year of the U.S. engineer they just let go.
I do robotics development in Silicon Valley for both new startups and with large established companies. Our small team is a mix of software and electrical engineers (we team up with other firms doing mechanical and industrial design) and we're finding it difficult to keep up with all the opportunities in the burgeoning robotics field. The nice thing is it seems we're just at the infancy of robotics so growth should be sustainable for quite a while.
I don't know if growth in robotics can compensate for overall declines elsewhere, but it's at least one promising area of growth for electrical engineer over the coming decade and beyond. Currently, pretty much every robot is a unique design built from the ground up so the opportunities are very similar to what was available in the Valley during the early days of computing when pretty much every computer design was unique and created from the ground up. Certainly this will eventually change, but for now it makes for fun and interesting work that is in demand.
Donald Trump is a businessman. A person who thinks like a businessman doesn't really care what they're saying right now, when push comes to shove they will get themselves ahead and no one else.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
But not only that, more importantly IMO is that the engineering takes place where the factories are. From a market viewpoint it makes sense to integrate both design, developing, testing and manufacturing. Just let them do all the work from start to finish over there, because it will cut down on the time it takes to develop and ship out new products.
That you get better stuff out the door quicker when you have development and manufacturing working closely together isn't really that new.
The big question is what the west is going to do while Asia does both development and manufacturing. Just being consumers only works until you run out of money.
Well, I guess it will be time to start up manufacturing then. Starving labor tends to be cheap.
Keep in mind that these may be called Electrical engineers, but while the discussion here is around electronics product design,many EEs work outside outside of designing electronics. The article statistics represent a broad line of sub-specialties. Many EEs are employed as PEs working with buildings/architectural firms, manufacturing engineering, industrial controls (such as water treatment plant controls) and transmission lines. Many older embedded software engineers have EE degrees, but many of the up and coming embedded software engineers I see are not out of pure EE programs. Even for electronic design there is a lot of work writing verilog code that feels more like SW coding than biasing transistors and measuring with an O-scope. For that matter, MEs end-up with a much broader range of different subspecialties and not just drawing HVAC vents.