Never mind Lara and the tourists, where the bloody hell are the engineers?

Lara Bingle enticed tourists to Australia in 
the famous ad

So the papers are all up in arms this week over the defection of Lara Bingle, the model who promoted Australian tourism in the famous and sometimes controversial  ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ ad.

Lara’s talents, it seems, are for sale to the highest bidder. In this case New Zealand. Fair enough; the woman is a professional, let her take work wherever she can find it. The job market for models, like any other profession, is international.

I don’t think we’re suffering too much. Six million tourists visited our shores over the last year, a 0.5% increase on the previous year. Considering the economic state of the countries that yield a lot of our tourism dollars, we should be glad of these numbers. Especially while Europe is still frantically searching under the sofa for its lost credit card, and the Americans are on self imposed lock down.

Let’s face the fact that tourism is far less of an issue right now than encouraging the right number of high skilled migrants to move here for long term temporary assignments and fill some empty Australian engineering jobs.

Australia will become the world's biggest liquefied natural gas producer, by 2020 as it unlocks its 100 year reserves. Analysts predict it will soon overtake current leader Qatar.

Seventy percent of the world's 10 major LNG projects are under construction here and billions are being spent on infrastructure year on year.

The biggest threat to achieving this growth and all the benefits that come with it is people. We don’t have the engineering skills in the quantity we need them in house and we need to look overseas for them now. We need to look to the UK and Europe to build our engineering workforces and absorb the key skills into the Australian population in greater numbers.  

So if you see Lara, tell her to find a drawing board and a hard hat and make Australian engineering jobs sound sexy and exciting. Australia may need her yet. 

The skills crisis is very real. Although for most, the solutions remain imaginary.

More needs to be done to meet the demand for highly-skilled workers and to prevent increases in youth unemployment, according to a statement released today by the Government's workforce and productivity agency.

Terrific. That’s that sorted then. Who’s for a beer?

This year-long study, which may just as well be subtitled ‘how I learned to stop worrying and state the obvious’ is only addressing a small proportion of the overall problem.

It’s all well and good to talk about the need for training, it is true that only proper teaching and apprenticeship programs can develop the skilled labor we need. But our real problems lie the other side of the line where training becomes education, where training involves spending years at university getting an engineering degree and then building a few years experience on projects. These are the people we need, and you can no more train people to achieve this status than you can train someone to be a doctor. Both things take a comparable amount of time.

There’s a lot of rubbish talked by analysts who point to the fact that we have 350,000 engineers and 325,000 engineering jobs, but this is entirely the wrong measure of the situation.

The relevant figures are all related to slow growth.  On average Australia produces 9,500 engineers each year and loses 4,500 to retirement, creating an average net increase of about 5,000.

That doesn’t sound so bad, until you consider that over the last decade, the additional demand for Australian engineers averages 13,000 each year and has reached over 20,000 on occasions.  The result is a major deficit that threatens the completion of key projects. It is these projects that have proofed Australia from the worst of the global recession. Our LNG infrastructure must continue to develop to capitalize on the business available from emergent markets. This means engineers, lots of them and a sensible plan for getting them in place.

We must develop a long-term, sustainable strategy, including intake and education. We must also banish our reluctance to hire expertise in from the rest of the world.

We have little to lose now in the long run from filling the critical Australian engineering jobs from the UK, USA or even the Philippines. We have a great deal to lose if our national project portfolio continues to buckle under the weight of our current problems.

Trevor Burne is Managing Director of Talascend. He blogs about Australian engineering jobs, and issues affecting Australian Engineers.