 "Engineers
Get Rich as Talent War Heats Up." That's the title of a story on
Yahoo! Finance website, dated July 25, 2013. According to the author,
it's a job-seeker's market out there for engineers - not for all engineers
necessarily, but certainly for those with expertise in the energy exploration,
capturing, and generation businesses. In spite of the politicians' best
efforts to kill the carbon-based fuel markets, the world's high demand
for electricity and fuel has created a boom in fields other than just
the government-approved "renewable" (a misnomer generally and a non
sequitur in context) energy schemes like wind and solar power.
No sooner were Congress and White House occupants congratulating
themselves for ongoing success in utterly killing the coal industry
(in the process of demonizing burning of all fossil fuels) when the
advent of modernized hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') for extraction
of shale gas rose suddenly and positively in the public and corporate
eyes as the new potential economic savior. Attempts to convince the
public that fracking will cause their toilets to explode when a cigarette
is tossed into it or that their homes will be swallowed by gigantic
platonic shifts in the earth's crust have worked only with the tinfoil
hat crowd. As multi-generational families of coal workers are being
heaped onto the unemployment and government dependency pile, a new cadre
of workers are being primed and trained for exploiting gas energy.
The upside of any specific industry undergoing massively expansive
growth is that often an even larger community of subcontracting, manufacturing,
transportation, marketing, and uncountable other supporting businesses
are spawned in its wake. One pertinent example is SCADA (Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition) equipment for monitoring operations ranging
from the extraction site all the way through energy production and distribution.
Who designs SCADA equipment? Electrical, mechanical, and software engineers,
of course! According to an April 2013 story from the
CNN Money website, new college graduates are receiving amazingly
high starting salaries. Petroleum engineers can expect around $93k per
year beginning in year one. Computer engineers get about $72k, chemical
engineers are at $67k, and computer science majors draw about $64k per
year. Unfortunately for most RF Cafe visitors, electrical engineers
are near the bottom at around $62k per year. Average starting pay across
all science and engineering fields stands at around $48k per year. Don't
feel too bad, though, because as usual the civil engineering guy's pay
makes it difficult to decide whether accepting an offer from McDonalds
would be a better lifetime career choice. Why are the petroleum
and chemical engineers commanding so much more money? Simple; they are
directly in the revenue stream of the energy business and they are often
field positions that require them to be in the thick of the activity.
That makes it nearly impossible to offshore their jobs, although no
doubt there are plenty of foreign nationals brought here to America
for work. That means even though the reported pay scales are amazingly
high, the report does not get into what portion of those jobs are being
filled by foreign students who stick around after graduation to fill
the slots. Remember that especially in realms like energy exploration,
logistics, and production, the corporate chieftains are intimately (sometimes
literally) involved with power brokers in Washington, D.C. Nothing is
as it seems. Posted
July 26, 2013
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