The Importance of Engineering Talent to the Prosperity and Security of the Nation Summary of a Forum (2014) / Chapter Skim
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I: Talent in the Engineering Enterprise
I: Talent in the Engineering Enterprise
Pages 1-14
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But in China, such enrollment nearly doubled and is now about equal to that of the European Union, Japan, and United States combined. Furthermore, in Asia, 19.2 percent of all college graduates are engineers; 1
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The United States has Fourth, the policies that cre benefited greatly from foreign educated engineers for the ate talent are local or national, but past 60 years. "I know.
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The United States was the unquestioned innovation leader in the second half of the 20th century, Suresh acknowledged, but it did so partly by attracting and retaining talent from around the world. A quarter of all the American recipients of the Nobel Prize received their first degree abroad, as did a quarter of all the members of the National Academy of Sciences.
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R&D in the United States is becoming a smaller part of a larger whole as technology becomes increasingly global. In particular, the center of gravity of global research is shifting eastward as R&D expenditures in Asia expand.
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The Defense Department, Office of Science and Technology Policy, State Department, and Immigration and Naturalization Service are working on an initiative to provide a fast track to citizenship for highly qualified foreign graduates of colleges and universities who might wish to remain permanently in the United States. Such a program would be a way to retain the best and the brightest young engineers for work in US laboratories.
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"In my 45 years in the business, I have never been bored for an instant," he said. "I cannot imagine a better life that somebody could have." RAISING THE PROFILE OF ENGINEERING IN THE UNITED KINGDOM Alec Broers, a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom and past president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, reminded the forum attendees that the United States remains dominant interna The Queen Elizabeth Prize tionally in high technology.
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The United Kingdom has managed to maintain a flat governmental budget for science, engineering, and technology despite cuts in most other areas.
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The goal, said Broers, is to recognize work "where engineers have changed the world for the better in a big way." ENGINEERS AS CONNECTION MAKERS The number of engineering degrees awarded in the United States has actually risen over the past decade -- by 40 percent at the undergradu ate level, 24 percent at the master's level, and 71 percent at the PhD Combining both breadth and level, noted Marie Thursby, Regents' rigor in engineering education Professor and Hal and John Smith is "no mean task." Marie Thursby, Georgia Tech Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Scheller College of Business. Fur thermore, the number of US PhDs granted in engineering is much higher than for any scientific field other than the biological sciences, and has increased dramatically over the past century.
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Projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for growth in engineering jobs from 2008 to 2018 are only slightly higher than for growth in all occupations. Furthermore, real wages for engineering graduates have been more or less constant during the last 20 years, which does not indicate a rosy job outlook.
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Engineers still need to be technically superior, Thursby noted, so a broader education cannot lose its rigor, which "is no mean trick." But innovative approaches to engineering education can help produce not just chief technology officers but chief executive officers. RETAINING ENGINEERING'S PLACE IN SOCIETY Discovery is often celebrated as the realization of human dreams, said William Banholzer, chief technology officer and executive vice president at the Dow Chemical Company.
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Asian companies have figured this out and are trying to overcome the United States' lead. "We have to be very jealous and guard the unique position we have right now, and talent is first and foremost." At the same time, an English-speaking jet-lagged engineer cannot go to China to solve a problem.
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"A single person can manipulate a conceptually vast object in this mental space just by typing on a keyboard," he said. Most of the big name software companies had at least one or a handful of these people early in their histories, which is "one of the reasons, if not the reason, why they are big software companies now." The challenge for companies is that not many ten-x programmers exist, and they can be hard to recruit and retain.
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But engineers should keep an open mind when confronted with strange ideas from otherwise accomplished and brilliant people. These individuals come from everywhere, not just the United States -- a 19-year-old Sri Lankan girl who has been selling iPad games since she was 15 may be a ten-x'er.
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Companies need to learn how to identify these people and deal with them in ways that do not destroy their motivations. Finally, the United States needs to hang a sign on its borders that says, "We are open for business," Baggett said.
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