Growing More Engineers

March 3, 2022

Celebration of World Engineering Day brings to mind that we need more engineers to “join the club,” and great places to start are student-focused science and engineering fairs.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

The World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) is celebrating “World Engineering Day for a Sustainable World” on March 4^th. WECO hosts events like the World Engineering Day Hackathon, too.

As it turns out, March is also when most science and engineering fairs like the Mercer Science and Engineering Fair, which I help run, take place. It’s affiliated with the Society for Science’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair that occurs in May.

The reason I bring up science and engineering fairs is that they offer one way to get students interested in science and engineering, and hopefully encourage them to become scientists, programmers, and engineers.

The past couple years have been challenging given COVID-19. Our fair has been virtual since Rider University closed its doors to our in-person event. After doing online interviews, we may actually keep this approach since we’ve been able to get judges to participate from across the country.

One might think that getting judges to do an in-person event would be easy. That is definitely NOT the case. I would encourage scientists and engineers who don’t regularly participate in these events to do so. It’s a little work for a great payback.

Our annual Salary Survey indicates that most engineers are satisfied with their jobs (Fig. 1) and would recommend it to students. Likewise, students are still choosing science and engineering fields in large numbers, but not large enough. So, a bit more encouragement early is where you can help.

1. Job satisfaction is high in the science and engineering fields.

Finding good engineers for any area at any time can be a challenge. However, certain positions in our industry are especially hard to fill (Fig. 2). Analog, wireless, and power engineers are right up there with software and embedded-system developers.

2. Finding engineers for these categories can be challenging. New engineers are one source.

Buzzword areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence may not be as big right now, but it’s due more to the fact that many are still investigating the technology (Fig. 3). The results are from a recent survey we did on machine learning in the engineering community.

3. Machine learning is a hot topic that's in the investigation stage for most engineers.

Engineering is a great job, and we want more people to join our ranks. Lend a hand when you can.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.