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Engineers in short supply across the pond

by on22 December 2011



Green card anyone?


The Land of the Free is desperately short of engineers who will work in the earthquake infested Silicon Valley.

A report from startup Identified claims that people with engineering degrees on Identified have Identified scores that are 1.2 times those of liberal arts majors with equivalent work experience, meaning they are more sought after for jobs. In non-technical fields, people with engineering degrees are still more wanted than liberal arts majors with the same years of work experience. After five years of experience, those with engineering degrees in technical fields had a score of 68, compared with a 60 for engineers in non-technical fields and 51 for liberal arts majors.

Tech executives and venture investors have gotten behind the Startup Visa idea, which would enable immigrant founders who create jobs through their new companies to stay in the U.S. That proposal, introduced in March, has not gotten through Congress which is a little worried that it will let more Mexican dishwashers in rather than highly skilled Bosnian programmers. [Will code for food. Ed]

Apparently there’s an increasing demand both from tech companies and non-tech companies for highly-skilled engineers to create, build and maintain high quality systems at various levels from manufacturing to product design. Software is one major area of growth where engineers are needed.

While this has all happened the growth in engineering grads has not kept pace, and the only place to get the is from overseas. Even this is beginning to dry up. The U.S. H1-B Visa program was designed to bring talented “speciality occupations” such as engineers into the US. However the number of engineers using this has been dropping. We guess no one wants to work in a place which is ruled by corporates. In the EU we know our politicians are corrupt, but at least they are obvious about it and don't lecture us on the bible while they do it.

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