Electrical Engineer Unemployment Soars; Software Developers' Rate Drops to 2.2%

dcblogs writes "The unemployment rate for people at the heart of many tech innovations — electrical engineers — soared in the first quarter of this year to 6.5%. That's nearly double the unemployment rate from last year. The reasons for the spike aren't clear, but the IEEE-USA says the increase is alarming. At the same time, U.S. Labor Dept. data showed that jobs for software developers are on the rise. The unemployment rate for software engineers was 2.2% in the first quarter, down from 2.8% last year. This professional group warns that unemployment rates for engineers could get worse if H-1B visas are increased. The increase in engineering unemployment comes at the same time demand for H-1B visas is up."

Be carful what you read in this article.

[ErstO]

Although Electrical Engineers may include Electronic Engineers, they are really two different disciplines, Electrical Engineers typically work the construction trades, building and power transmissions. Most engineers involved in integrated circuits, digital circuits and most of the new tech innovations, are more Electronic Engineers then Electrical Engineers. The high employment rate in Electrical Engineers is mainly following the low employment rate for all the construction industries. Grads with a degree in the Electronic Engineering fields ... even with no work experience will have no problem finding work, at least here in CA.

Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Osgeld]

Its hard to get talent.

I work for a small electronics company doing mid sized work for stupid large companies, I work in the engineering department, I do not have a degree in EE, I am a computer science guy with 4 years of EE in high school, and nearly 2 decades of hobby experience, I have professionally written for 2 websites in hobby electronics, and I was hired after 2 interviews (age 34 btw).

Its taken a couple months and dozens of interviews to find another teammate that can at least keep up, let alone bring new and interesing designs to the table... and when your self thought tech can stump a 4 year EE graduate with a simple constant current 317 question (which is commonplace in our applications), that also doesn't know shit about a spreadsheet in order to present his ideas in a mathematical form, then yes, the chances of you landing a job dramatically decreases.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[erice]

The high employment rate in Electrical Engineers is mainly following the low employment rate for all the construction industries. Grads with a degree in the Electronic Engineering fields ... even with no work experience will have no problem finding work, at least here in CA.

By "CA" you must mean Canada because in California, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area (including Silicon Valley) this is not remotely true. Engineerig jobs that don't require experience are nearly myth. Listings are few and require quite specific experience.

Re:Learn to code

[thegarbz]

If you have done the work to become an EE you should know how to code fairly well already.

Funny you should say that. I saw an engineer explode at a lecturer saying he was an EE and "coding" was purely in the domain of IT and didn't belong in his degree. He spent 15 minute having a shouting match saying that this should be a core subject for the degree if people aren't interested in it.

Anyway the subject was advanced engineering mathematics and the lecturer was describing how to do FDTD analysis. The student had trouble with the concept of a "for" loop in Matlab.

Guess who failed (and yet most likely graduated anyway) without any coding knowledge.

Re:One cause

[TheRaven64]

It's not free, it's taxpayer funded. The lecturers don't work for free and the universities don't run for free. They are paid, by the government, in proportion to the number of students that they have plus their research grants. Depending on the university, the research grants pay somewhere between 20 and 100% of any given lecturer's salary. For universities without such a strong research reputation, the money from tuition can be a significant amount of a department's total budget. If your choice is either lower standards of make a lecturer redundant (which weakens your ability to get research grants and lowers your teaching quality, which makes it harder to attract students), what do you do?