They need them too

The last two years has appeared recurrently in the news a story about how many engineers need Europe to maintain the economical growth and the need of the industry.

The last couple of months the story has changed to how many qualified immigrants we need to fill all the jobs that will create Europe in the next years. The number is about one hundred thousand people.

There are some problems that our governments are ignoring.

The first one is that the countries where this people will be coming from need them more than we do. It is stupid to fund programs to help developing countries when we are taking their human capital. There are no development without qualified people (doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, ...). All the money that we can give can not replace them. To take away this people will kill the economies of these countries.

The second problem is why we do not have as many qualified people as we need. In Spain during the last ten years the people that goes to the university to obtain a degree has descended abruptly. This is very evident in the engineering schools.

There are many reasons for that, one of them are the level of the compulsory education in our country. The last PISA report gives to our country one of the worst evaluations of the last years. The lower the level, the more difficult to the students to obtain a degree. More and more students abandon their studies after the first year of their degree because of lack of an adequate level of preparation.

The other reason are the salaries of the people with a degree and the perception that having a degree is not a guarantee to have a good job. Statistics say other thing, the salary of people with a degree double the salaries of non qualified workers and unemployment is lower.

But people not live by the statistics, only the perception that the effort of five or more years of hard work does not pay enough lead to people to other career choices.

Where is the solution? In my opinion, if you want engineers, you have to prepare the people that you need from the beginning. Putting more money into the first levels of education is a good start.

Evidently, our industry has to change too, they have to appreciate more the education that people receive and try to use them to innovate and create new opportunities. We need that because obviously we do not want that our people have to go to more developed countries to find a job adequate to their capabilities. And this is just the problem that we have started with :-)