Help Wanted: Engineers

The boom-and-bust profession is once again booming

While the Reagan Administration and congressional leaders are worrying about rapidly rising unemployment, the job picture in at least one area of the economy is bright: engineering. At commencement exercises this month and next, up to 65,000 men and women will receive bachelor's degrees in engineering from about 280 institutions. Perhaps 80% of them will go to work almost immediately at starting salaries ranging from $21,000 to $30,000 and, in a few cases, even up to $40,000. They will be able to choose among multiple job offers from U.S. corporations large and small. Says Herbert Stein, head of the systems engineering department at the University of Illinois: "Most engineers are in demand regardless of their specialty."

At the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, perhaps the best engineering school in the U.S., a pack of recruiters from 169 companies pounced on 147 graduates this past winter. They regard each recruit from Caltech as a "capture," in the jargon of the business, to be treasured and pampered. Kenneth Sieck, 22, has talked with 20 aerospace company recruiters and has taken six plant tours, including a visit to an IBM facility in Tucson, complete with rental car, dinner and lunches. At Northrop Aircraft, company officials proudly showed him their latest equipment.

Some experts, though, are starting to warn that a paucity of engineers may hold back American economic and technological development. High-tech companies in the Sunbelt and the Northeast seem most concerned. Says William Howard, a vice president of Motorola who is based in Arizona: "The shortage has slowed down our progress, slowed down our development of new processes and slowed down our ability to do maintenance. The net effect is to put things on hold or do them more slowly until we can recruit the talent." A study prepared for California Governor Jerry Brown Jr. showed that the state's electronics industry will create jobs for 62,000 electrical and computer scientists during the next five years, but the state's universities will turn out only 14,000 students capable of filling those jobs.

Engineering has long been in a boom-and-bust cycle. In the late 1950s, after the first Sputnik was launched, it was a hot field. Then in the early 1970s, with the winding down of the Project Apollo space program and the Viet Nam War, and the cancellation of projects to build an American supersonic commercial airplane, engineers had a tough time finding work. Now glamorous new computer technologies as well as advances in other fields of applied science have made the profession popular once again.

There is testament to this in many newspapers. Every Sunday, for example, the Los Angeles Times has two full sections of advertisements for engineers that have been placed by some of the biggest names in U.S. business. Rockwell International claims to "meet the challenge head on." Convair pleads: "Hang on. Convair's coming to town." Says Douglas Boswell, a West Coast engineer recruiter: "When the right electrical engineer comes along, I can get him five interviews in a single day."