The problem of the graduate job market
Is this just me?
Various bits of the aerospace industry need, as they always have, competent graduate engineers - working in design offices, analysis, planning, research, and so-on.
However, I see an increasing dichotomy going on here. I can see virtually no employers (including my own) prepared any more to take-on recent graduates and provide structured training schemes that move them from the position of a bewildered but trainable graduate, to a competent Engineer.
In the meantime, these organisation generally NEED staff, and are actively trying to recruit - but they all want people with a certain amount of experience (usually no more and no less) to fit a combination of "min salary" and "max experience" that each recruiter seems to consider optimal. There's a very limited supply of such Engineers, so many posts go unfilled - p***ing of everybody else who still have to get the jobs done.
The result is that although the universities are churning out graduates in mechanical / systems / aerospace engineering, these folks aren't getting jobs - nobody's recruiting fresh graduates, and so there's no route for them to get any experience. As a result they're drifting off to be accountants, schoolteachers, and (worst of all) web developers.
The outcome is a steady reduction in the number of competent Engineers in the aerospace industry - despite an escalating output from the universities.
There is of-course no point at-all in trying to appoint to these positions from within the "licenced" community, since these folks don't have the specific academics to do the graduate type jobs (and there's no easy way for them to get them). In any case, why should they wish to?, there's a similar scarcity of licenced Engineers and Techicians, but because they work on the operational side (and they are therefore absolutely essential to lucrative airline operations) salaries have outstripped those of most graduate engineers anyhow.
So, we have a slow reduction in the number of skilled people in this industry, whilst those remaining become more skilled - but scarcer and therefore more expensive. In the meantime, the industry globally is still expanding and more is demanded of those left.
Sooner or later, something's gotta give. My hope is that it'll be that the industry starts recruiting and training at the bottom again to a much greater extent that at present - but I don't actually see any sign of it.
G
Needed to get it out of my system.