Thank you for the opportunity to appear today.
Engineers Canada is the national body that represents the provincial and territorial regulators of the engineering profession. Canada's engineering regulators license 270,000 engineers across the country in all disciplines. This group of qualified professionals includes engineers-in-training just starting their careers, mid-career licence holders juggling work and family pressures, and professional engineers contemplating retirement.
The regulators help keep Canadians safe by making sure that licensed engineers are held to the highest standards of engineering education, professional qualifications, and professional practice and ethics.
Engineers Canada's most recent labour market study showed that in most jurisdictions, there will be shortages of engineers with five to ten years of experience or specialized skills, while new graduates from engineering programs may have difficulty finding jobs between now and 2020.
This shortage could have an impact on economically significant industries including public infrastructure, natural resources, manufacturing, general construction, research and development.
Today, l'd like to focus on three recommendations that l believe should form part of how the federal, provincial, and territorial governments move forward as they negotiate and implement labour market development agreements. The smooth implementation of programs like the Canada job grants program has a potential to address employer's needs and ease the serious skills mismatch in professions like engineering.
Every year we survey engineering students who are at the end of their bachelor of engineering degrees. Almost 80% of the 12,000 engineering graduates want to immediately join the workforce as engineers, but employers are looking for specialized engineers with five to ten years' experience. To become a professional engineer, these graduates require four years of work experience.
The result is a group of talented, disappointed graduates who are frustrated, and under-resourced employers. We are told that employers are hesitant to invest in the training required to develop the skills and specializations they want. Employers are looking to fill the gap at the top of the ranks, and even though more students are pursuing engineering, they do not necessarily meet employers' current needs.
The Canada job fund and Canada job grant are steps in the right direction, but must consider going beyond the current focus on small and medium-sized businesses and short-term training, and consider an emphasis on trades and college-level training.
Secondly, the employment benefits that support measures that are the current focus of labour market development agreements need to be evaluated to ensure that they are providing the right training. This may mean looking beyond the trades and apprenticeships and how we incent and engage highly skilled jobs such as engineering for those with academic credentials who are finding themselves unemployed.
Another aspect is to help make sure that the design of the employment benefits under the labour market development agreements, or employment insurance benefits, are not disincentives to long-term employment or long-term incentives by employers.
One suggested change to the broader employment insurance regime, proposed by the Women in Engineering and Geoscience Task Force, our association in British Columbia, is adjustments to how employment insurance for parental and maternity leaves are structured. Allowing parents to voluntarily maintain a certain level of engagement with their jobs without penalty can promote retention in the profession with specific employers. Over time, this can make any dollars an employer is spending on training an even better return on investment.
Finally, Engineers Canada believes that the aspects of addressing unemployment and skills mismatches and shortages is getting to the right people, in the right careers, from the get-go. Even though there are approximately 70,000 undergraduate students in accredited engineering programs across Canada, we still need more.
Between now and 2020, approximately 95,000 engineers could fully or partially retire, and an estimated 16,000 new engineering jobs will be created. We need to focus on the attention by professions, employers, academia, and governments to keep our economy growing.
For our part, Engineers Canada is launching new tools to help prospective and current engineers succeed and better understand skills and attributes they need to fully participate in the engineering economy. Our CareerFocus assessment, to be fully launched this fall, will allow potential and current engineering students to assess their ability to succeed in engineering and will be able to help identify their strengths in the areas of improvement that they may bring to their employer.
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