Shrinking Pool of Engineers in Singapore

Pertaining to my earlier blog post, Plight of Technical Workers, there is an article published in The Strait Times today (12 July 2015) on the shrinking pool of engineers in Singapore.

Basically the article highlighted several key points as follows.

1. Most school leavers are reluctant to study engineering-related courses so much that our tertiary institutions need to admit foreigners to makeup the shortfall.
2. Other sectors such as banking offer higher salaries attracted many engineering graduates and resulted in the engineering sector having one of the largest number of job vacancies.
3. Many locals feel that engineering involves hard tedious work, contain little opportunity to progress upwards and more importantly an unglamorous job compared to other professions.
4. Although hardware and expertise could easily be procured from abroad, there is a need to develop our own capabilities to maintain and troubleshoot.

As a fellow engineer or rather technical person myself, I fully agree with all the above key points mentioned by the writer who is also an engineer himself. This has been a problem since the time I was enrolled into the polytechnic many years back. Engineering courses were the least preferred choice in local polytechnics and universities so much that they had lenient entry requirements and cut-off points. Certainly, more could be done to attract more locals to take up engineering related courses.