What STEM shortage? Electrical engineering lost 35,000 jobs last year

[ChromeFoundry]

Will the Internet of Things create jobs in the U.S. or offshore?
[font size="1"]By Patrick Thibodeau - COMPUTERWORLD
January 16, 2014 04:27 PM ET[/font]

Despite an expanding use of electronics in products, the number of people working as electrical engineers in U.S. declined by 10.4% last year. The decline amounted to a loss of 35,000 jobs and increased the unemployment rate for electrical engineers from 3.4% in 2012 to 4.8% last year, an unusually high rate of job losses for this occupation.

There are 300,000 people working as electrical engineers, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by the IEEE-USA. In 2002, there were 385,000 electrical engineers in the U.S.

"Electrical and electronics engineers are at the heart of high technology innovation," (Ron) Hira said. "Just like America's manufacturing has been hollowed out by offshoring and globalization, it appears that electrical and electronics engineering is heading that way."

The number of employed software developers, the largest IT occupation segment, increased by only 1.75%, to 1.1 million, a gain of 19,000. The unemployment rate for developers last year was 2.7%, which is still elevated, according to Hira. Jobs for computer systems analysts increased by 35,000, to 534,000, an increase of 7%, but Hira said it is the most common H-1B occupation and that nearly all those gains went to H-1B visa holders.

Full article: Here

[LiberalEsto]

1. Destroying the middle class, one career path at a time n/t

[antigop]

2. Hillary Clinton reaffirms support for more H-1B visas

Thanks for nothing, Hillary.

[antigop]

3. Hillary touts "advantages" of outsourcing of US jobs

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/ndtv-exclusive-hillary-clinton-on-fdi-mamata-outsourcing-and-hafiz-saeed-full-transcript-207593

Hillary Clinton: So you are talking about the outsourcing of US jobs to India. We know it's been going on for many years now and it's part of our economic relationship with India and I think there are advantages with it that have certainly benefitted many parts of our country and there are disadvantages that go to the need to improve the job fields of our own people and create a better economic environment so it's like anything like the pluses and minuses."

[OhioChick]

4. No surprise there n/t

[Igel]

5. No, no surprise at all.

Mostly because I've seen lots of stories about how we don't need STEM grads because so many different STEM fields are losing jobs hand over fist in the last year or two.

Sadly, they're always "electrical engineering"--or "Electrical engineering," "Electrical Engineering," "electrical and electronics engineering"--and they all go back to the same journal article. IT was often mentioned as the case proving that we didn't need more IT folk, but with job gains there the claim is harder to make.

It's very hard to find this kind of information for mechanical, civil, architectural, chemical, and other kinds of engineering; or for chemistry, physics, or pretty much any science; or for actuaries and other kinds of statisticians. It's not so much a STEM story as an EE story and flops smack-dab into a whole-part fallacy.

I'm willing to grant that we currently have too many EE grads (although going for 100% employment is foolish; a lot of grads aren't competent--it's like being happy that your doctor was last in his class at a 3rd tier medical school and barely passed his residency the second time). The trend in "research" and business--even government--is to go for what gets you immediate payoffs, gets products to the consumer asap, gives immediate results. Things like Bell Labs semiconductor research, basic research done to expand knowledge and which may not have a payoff for decades, if ever, is so alien to much of modern American thinking that it's amazing we still are in the top 10 economies for innovation. Industry would never do that research today; it would have a hard time getting funding from any source unless it could predict what benefits we'd get in the near future. You can't predict benefits from basic research.

This particular article also blurs the distinction between "outsourcing" and "offshoring." The MSM were able to keep them distinct for a while, until "offshoring" became a subject of special outrage during the recession. Then they merged them for a lot of purposes because it suited them. A friend has a job only because some companies "outsourced" some work; he's a consultant, has been for a couple of decades now. He's firmly in the US (although he's had to fly to other countries because some of the companies also offshored some tasks--although the countries he flies to are generally expensive countries like Japan or Germany).