We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Pipe (Jerry Martin Commentary)

(Shutterstock)

Engineers Week, or EWeek, is this month. From Feb. 16-22, an industrywide effort to raise awareness of the science and engineering professions — how essential they are to our everyday lives and how much fun they are — will take place in elementary and middle schools.

Here in Arkansas and states across the nation, Garver will send engineers into classrooms as part of the industrywide effort to address an alarming engineering labor shortage. By engaging K-12 students, we seek to increase the number of them who will pursue an engineering degree and career.

I absolutely support EWeek and outreach programs like it, but as good as these initiatives are at addressing the industry’s future needs, they cannot close the present gap between open positions and available workers. We have to do more to reach people in the workforce now, and that means reaching out to those with different educational or professional backgrounds.

Yes, we need people with engineering degrees; there’s no doubt about it. But we also need people without those degrees, or without degrees at all. We need to get the message out that you don’t have to have an engineering degree to contribute to the well-being of your community as a member of the architecture, engineering and construction services industry.

There are so many careers inside the engineering and STEM industry: human resources, finance and communications specialists; building information modeling and computer-aided design technicians; proposal coordinators; and more. On Garver’s careers page alone, we have openings for 60 nonengineering positions. These are positions with growth potential. A person may begin as a civil designer and move into a project manager role, for example.

And there are educational options outside of four- and two-year college degrees. Technical and trade schools offer valuable education and career pathways, something that isn’t lost on Arkansans, 89.5% of whom voted yes on Issue 1 to allow lottery scholarships and grants to be awarded for vocational training programs and technical education.

We, as an industry, should embrace and promote these as AEC career pathways. Our university presence, internships and support of STEM education in K-12 builds a pipeline for recruiting and hiring those with engineering degrees. We need more students in that pipeline. We also need to diversify the pipeline to show that there are many paths leading to our industry.

By doing our part to recruit all the people who can play a role, we can build a bigger and stronger pipeline that helps close the labor shortage gap.

Jerry Martin, Garver’s Arkansas water team leader, helps municipalities solve pressing water and wastewater concerns ranging from collection and reuse to distribution and storage design.