What recent news really means for engineering jobs in Australia

Iron Ore price may have jumped, but the  big picture 

offers less cause for confidence. 

Recent surges in iron ore prices may be a comfort to some, but before anyone starts getting too excited, they should look to the wider view and the inevitability of long term decline in need from China.

This month the news is good. A 6.7% jump resulting from news of approvals in Chinese Infrastructure projects. It’s enough to put the price back over $100 a tonne, which though well short of the $150 high, is at least over the recent $90 level.

There remains however, an inevitable truth to be faced. China’s economy is shifting. As the Chinese population starts to consume more of its own products, rather than relying on external markets for exports, its need for steel and the raw materials used to produce it, will drop and drop.

Steel futures in Shanghai are dropping as we speak. While China continues to overproduce steel, the $150bn in approved projects will not be enough to build confidence in future need. Only cuts in production at Chinese steel mills will stabilize the price.

But in a market that’s seriously fragmented who’s going to do that? Who’s going to compromise their market share? And what are the state run facilities going to do about the jobs it will cost? The answer is that everyone is going to hope for a solution somewhere else in the supply chain.

Today Fortescue will ask lenders to waive debt covenants. As the world’s fourth largest iron ore producer, the company is suffering severely from the weak demand in China, its largest market. Fortescue has avoided raising equity capital, hoping instead for a rebound in commodity prices.  

Meanwhile, confusion reigns in India. In Goa, ‘serious illegalities and irregularities’ in mining operations have led to a freeze in production, as New Delhi continues to seek drops in exports to fulfill domestic need. India’s exports to China have dropped significantly – by 40% April - June.

So what does all this mean for the Australia mining job market? Time will tell, but the outlook is not immediately positive. It is the demand for minerals that has protected the Australian economy from the worst of the global financial crisis. But the fall in commodity prices, the closure of mines and - most significantly for engineers – the postponement and cancellation of expansion plans, will start to pull this protective blanket off the national economy.

The good news is that not everything is about mining projects.  Demand for engineers on LNG projects remains strong and our clients have continued to seek talent for ongoing expansion. As one door closes another one opens.

But there is a truth to face here – China will not be the magical bodyguard of the Australian economy forever. 

Qatar rail jobs represent great opportunities for Australian engineers

The first contracts for one of the largest engineering jobs in Qatar in recent years were awarded this week and the news is a reminder to Australian engineers that rail projects in Qatar will deliver a great many engineering job opportunities.

In all US$36bn of contracts will be awarded as Qatar seeks to transform its rail infrastructure in the run up to the FIFA World Cup in 2022.

Egis Rail and Jacobs are among the early winners, taking the project management and engineering contracts for the red and gold lines. Hill will manage the third green line.

Leighton, who have the contract to build a battery operated tram system to move students around Doha Education city, are hopeful that this role will open up opportunities on the main Doha Metro.

Elsewhere in Qatar, Lusail City’s light-rail transit system is expected to be finished in August 2016

Rail forms a key element of a massive expansion in Qatar. Construction activity involves four central projects: those planned for the World Cup; the $11bn Doha Airport (in two sections from 2012 to 2015.) Thirdly, $8bn Doha Port, to be completed in 2016 for phase one, with total completion in 2030.

All this is in addition to the $25bn of rail expenditure.

Across the GCC region, rail projects are plentiful. In Saudi, Construction has begun on the first high speed passenger line between Makkah and Madinah which is expected to be complete by January 2014. New railway and expansion rail jobs currently in process in the kingdom include North-South Rail, the Land-bridge Project (between Riyadh and Jeddah), and the GCC Railway, which is set to connect the six GCC members - Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Oman.

75% of Qatar’s revenues for this investment  come from it’s oil and gas sales, bolstered of late by increases in LNG exports, the revenues of which will leave the country with a comfortable budget surplus, regardless of their plans for all of this additional sustained expenditure.

All of this paints a fairly clear picture: if you’re thinking of an expat life style but you had ruled out the Middle East (based on perceptions of what it would be like to work in the region) you should take another look at Qatar.

Qatar plays host to large numbers of Commonwealth expats; and growing numbers of foreigners are working in Qatar to save money in the tax-free environment, and maintain a standard of living and wealth comparable to home. The kicker? Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world.

What’s not to like?


See immediate open Qatar Rail jobs.

No end in sight for Australian LNG jobs as US check book remains on the table

We get a lot of questions about the future of LNG for Australian engineering jobs. And I do mean a lot. Few things seem to occupy the minds of our industry colleagues across the world as much as the potential that LNG projects represent for the Australian economy and for the immediate future of global engineering jobs. Not since the 2003 spike in inquiries provoked by the Iraq reconstruction project, or the mass interest in building jobs for the London Olympics have I seen this much interest on one area of the global industry.

For now, Australia is at the centre of the engineering world. And it is foreign investment from the USA that is really driving the expansion, with relatively little of the money coming from China. 

Fred Hochberg, Chairman of US Ex-Im bank and a close economic advisor to President Obama has been in Australia this week to enforce the US’s commitment to sustained investment in the region, in the face of renewed efforts from China to lead spending over here.

"US investment is frankly far greater than any Chinese investment in Australia - it's the No 1 source of FDI (foreign direct investment) into Australia," said Hochberg while visiting Australia Pacific LNG on Curtis Island.

So America’s message is clear – We want you to know we care about you. Low interest loan money currently flooding in from the US is a clear signal that the US sees Australia as a safe bet for the long term. Investments from Ex-Im have been welcomed far more readily here than those coming in from China. The low interest loan money is linked to projects with heavy involvement from US companies like Bechtel and GE, so it’s a popular strategy within the US.

Cumulative US investment topped $550bn in Australia over the last seven years, compared with just $21b from China, Chevron's decision to push forward with its gigantic Gorgon and Wheatstone projects in Western Australia is a significant driver of this investment.

To justify this level of expenditure, we have to supply the human capital to get the jobs done. Where are the skilled labor jobs and engineering jobs going to be filled from?

The reality is that just as the investment money is coming from the US, a lot of the skills we need will have to come from outside too. If we handle it right, it will be good for us in the long term. 

We need to bring in resources from outside Australia to execute projects now and to help train and develop the next generation of Australian engineers who can fill engineering jobs in LNG for the next decade. The time is now. 

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.

As our immigration debate rages, cooler heads look to the UK

The UK engineering media is buzzing with Australia stories. The word is out that we are the hot ticket for British workers looking for lucrative Australia engineering jobs.

Immigration remains a sensitive issue for a lot of Australians. It’s easy to understand why, given the speed at which the population is evolving. Last year’s census revealed that there are now 21.7m people in Australia, which is a 9% increase from the 2006 figures.

2011 census data shows a steep climb
in immigration

This week we’ve seen the perils of illegal immigration and the tragic risks to which people are prepared to expose themselves to get here. This is a serious discussion and it’s happening in parliament as we speak; it’s beyond my pay grade and I’ll leave it to the people best placed to resolve the many issues associated with it.

Let’s talk about a different kind of immigration; let’s talk about white collar workers, those with advanced, critical skills and where we’re going to find them.  

We all know the background. Massive increases in demand for our natural resources from fast-growing economies with substantial populations are creating tremendous urgency to develop the infrastructure that can help meet demand. We have the buyers, we have the product; the hard part is finding the engineering professionals to get the job done.

The solution lies in bringing in contract workers on long term assignments and ensuring that the skills we bring into Australia temporarily remain here permanently through training and engagement.

We’ve never had such strong opportunities to attract engineers from the UK for example. Our brand as a country of opportunity is growing there more than ever. Every economy in the world is either suffering, or recovering from, a major financial crisis. Australia, in the eyes of the technical world, is boom town.

In my years working in London, I never encountered this degree of interest coming from all areas of the UK market. It’s time to take advantage of this; it’s in the long term interests of the Australian economy. The British represent the best source of long term temporary workers we’ve got. They are one of the world’s most mobile populations in professional terms, there are no language issues and there are cultural synergies that make every stage of the process easier.

If this is not a major target for you as a recruiting organization, it needs to be. It’s a very good idea to have a specific staffing strategy right now. There’s a lot of competition for these skills and there’s a limited talent pool anyway (as there is in every area of global engineering.)

If you’re a British engineer potentially looking for an exciting foreign opportunity, you need to make sure you’ve fully considered the Australia option. There’s a chance we may really need you out here. It’s a great place to bring your family, compared to many of the more traditional expat spots, and it’s going to be a lot easier than you think to make it a reality. 






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

The biggest mistake made in meetings...

Everyone’s an expert.

Do you ever notice that? When you’re sat in meetings on more or less any subject, the people sat round the table always seem to have plenty of opinions, often expressed with the certainty of fact, but very few have a lot of questions to ask.

I wonder why that is. In all circumstances in life where groups of people are trying collectively to reach a correct decision, the process is always question and answer based. Courtroom trials are based exclusively on questions and answers, as are committee hearings, enquiries and tribunals.

Asking questions is not just a practical necessity, it’s also a basic human courtesy. It’s the foundation of human interaction, for strangers as much as for old friends.

Do you come here often? What team do you support?  How are Mary and the kids?

Virtually all conversations are question and answer led, until you’re in a meeting room with eight of your colleagues. Then suddenly everyone seems far more interested in asserting their own opinion than they are in soliciting someone else’s.

Why do we indulge this? The most awful people we meet socially are those who never ask questions. You know the type. You’re at the pub and every time a line of conversation emerges, this person can only reference it in some way back to themselves. They are not interested in taking in, only in giving out.

“I’m very excited, I’m going to Tunisia next month.”

“I went to Tunisia last year.”

“I just got a text from my friend, she’s living in London at the moment.”

“When I was living in London I found the weather was just too much.”  

It’s easy to do. Relating things back to personal experience is natural, but it’s also intrinsically selfish and a real social turn off. How much better is it to ask questions? Imagine if the same person answered each statement with a question…

“I’m very excited, I’m going to Tunisia next month.”

“Really? Why did you choose Tunisia?”

“I just got a text from my friend, she’s living in London at the moment.”

“Where abouts is she staying?”

A person who asks questions is immediately more likable and will ultimately accomplish more. Asking questions makes the person you’re talking to feel like you’re interested and it gives you more information. When it comes to business, information is almost always useful in making progress and problem solving.

We all need to ask more questions and listen to the answers. There is a danger that you're asking less questions than you actually think you are. Paying close attention to how you behave, and whether you're a listener or a talker is very important. As an old poker-playing friend of mine says, if you look round the table and you can't see who the loser is, then it's you.

What do you think?




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

Your Facebook page poses professional problems right now (even without those photos.)

 

When Mark Zuckerberg updated his Facebook status from single to married this week, he probably wasn’t thinking it could affect his chances of getting his next job. And in the case of the internet billionaire, it probably won’t. But as Facebook becomes a standard tool for recruiters, even the most innocuous details could lead to missed opportunities, ethical mis-steps and ultimately legal trouble.

The amount of information we choose to publish about ourselves on the web is increasing rapidly. The uptake of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and personal blogs is becoming more and more prevalent with a current estimation of 900 million Facebook users, 250 million Twitter users and 150 million LinkedIn users.
When individuals choose which social media they want to be a part of, do they also need to draw the distinction between business and personal social media? Is the line between them becoming blurred? The answer is yes and no.

LinkedIn profiles have always been positioned as a business networking tool, and businesses have recognised the benefits and started to publically embrace the opportunities that sit with Facebook, Twitter and Blogs through their external product and service branding strategies. So, there is a definite business connection to Linkedin but recruiters need to be careful with what potential candidates say about themselves on Facebook and Twitter as these are still highly personal domains and can cross legal implications for recruiters, for example, religious views.

What are the ethics when it comes to organisations looking at candidates social media profile? Are we saying that some media is ok and some are not? Should a user even be concerned that they may be judged on what their profiles say about them? For example, young recently married women are notoriously unpopular with small business owners who fear the disruption and expense of a pregnancy. The law is there to prevent these questions being asked at interview, but it’s not there when the owner is checking Facebook. Unscrupulous employers can sidestep the spirit of legislation, with a lot of help from the job seeker.

Research from psychological studies have started to report it is possible to make accurate judgements about individuals on the personal attributes they exhibit just by looking and analysing their Facebook profile. The content of the profile can say a lot about the individual such as the photo’s displayed, the type of status updates and their likes and dislikes.

These pointers can be used as indicators on which to extrapolate and interpolate against the mainstays of identifiable qualities that make up good employees such as:

• Emotional stability
• Concienciousness
• Extroversion
• Intellectuality
• Agreeability

The Facebook profile can exhibit much information not only by the content on the page but the impression conjured by reading between the lines. It is not only what’s on the page but what’s not on the page that can bring about these additional insights.

Facebook privacy profiles are there for a reason, and must be respected by those hoping to carry out due diligence on individuals. However, a study from CareerBuilder has shown that 45% of employers admitted to looking at candidate social media during the hiring process.

Due to the popularity of the social media space, the line that divides acceptable use of social media to make judgements is inevitably going to change position over time. That said, it is very important to manage the way individual profiles are built and presented as they may be used to make value judgements about who we are and how good an employee we’d make.

It’s not just about hiding obviously sensitive material – those shots of your bachelor party in the Electric Pink Pussycat Club probably need to come down – it’s also about the details that identify aspects of your life where the law has been set up to offer you protection.







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

There is no such thing as too much opportunity

How many of us have looked down a restaurant menu and complained that there were too many things to choose from? We don’t mean it. What we mean is – this is great. As long as we basically understand what we want, the choice can only empower us.

My TV has 500 channels on it – more than I could possibly watch and more than I want to surf through. But I don’t have to surf through them. I understand what each option basically represents and I can go straight to what I want, or occasionally luck into something I wasn’t expecting. If I’m shopping for a new car, I’m better off at a lot with 5,000 cars than 500. As long as I have someone to help me get to the make and model I want, at the right age and price range, I don’t have to worry about the 4,950 cars I’m not interested in, unless I see something along the way that I didn’t know I was interested in.

At no stage is the amount of choice actually a bad thing.

The debate rages on across Australia as to the best way to manage your career and find the right job opportunities. We all know engineers are in high demand and that the work is everywhere. What engineers need to ask themselves is ‘Am I getting enough choice?’

Despite the wealth of possibilities for engineers today, a lot of people are massively restricting their options by trying to manage their career choices alone. If you’re applying directly to major employers and simply waiting for a response, you’re missing opportunities every day. If you’re trying to manage your applications one by one, you’re simply not boxing clever. Find yourself a decent recruiter, and you’ll see a step change in the quantity and quality of opportunity available to you.

You’re also missing out on some important benefits. Your agent can hustle for you; they can chase down answers and expedite the hiring process. The right agent will have enough influence with their client to actually get you the job.  They can show you options you may never have considered, help you compare rates and salaries and understand where you fit.

But all of these benefits are relatively small compared to the central, overwhelming advantage: Recruiters, who live their lives in the job market making hundreds of phone calls every week and meeting with new projects and new companies every day of every week for years on end, can give you access to far more opportunity than you could ever find yourself. How many different companies did you visit last month? How many projects did you walk through? How many new hiring managers and HR professionals did you meet? Not many. And why? Because it’s not what you do. You cannot do your job and look for the next one at the same time unless you are prepared to limit yourself to a far narrower range of opportunity.

This is the biggest mistake made by professional engineers in Australia. There is help and advice available; it never costs you a dollar at any stage and the benefits are obvious. Find yourself somebody good, with a strong reputation and infrastructure behind them. The result will be more opportunity, more choice and a faster way to achieve your objectives, whatever they are. 








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

High Demand and Low Supply leaves only Four Options for the Australia Job Market

It’s nice to be the centre of attention when the news is good. Australia is leading the world in job growth. Payrolls rose by just over 46,000 last month, the most since November 2010, compared with a median estimate for an increase of 10,000 in a recent Bloomberg News survey.

Full time jobs are up 12,300 in January, and part-time employment jumped 34,000. Overall participation rates – showing the number of eligible workers in gainful employment – also rose.

This growth is being driven by demand minerals and natural resources from the world’s two fastest growing economies – India and China who between them house a third of the world’s population. Bloomberg also reports that Oil & Gas salaries are up 17% to an average of $165,000 as the various developers fight to staff the eight major LNG ventures currently under construction. 

Australia now has to face the secondary challenge – filling these jobs with relevantly skilled people. Urgent vacancies and unemployed workers do not merge seamlessly to form a perfect whole. That’s not how the job market works.

We need sources of relevant workers, mostly in the engineering and technical sector - where most of these jobs came from and where most of the empty vacancies are building up.

Logically, there are four things that can happen:

1. Australian engineering jobs can be done in Australia by local workforces
2. Work can be shipped out of Australia
3. People can be shipped into Australia
4. The work can be left undone

As the world turns its eyes to Australia’s recent job market growth, we should focus our own energies on making sure the talent we need is available so that the demand is met with supply.

There is no quick fix, but there are things we have to do to build a stronger base for the future. Demand will remain high for a long time and that means opportunity for those leaving school right now to choose careers in engineering.

We also need to focus on training so that we can keep the necessary foreign skills that come into the country here, once overseas temporary workers are gone.

Right now, it’s time to bring the right people in to capitalize on the overall opportunity the growth offers.




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