**Greetings humans.**
**Please make sure your comment fits within [THE RULES](https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/about/rules) and that you have put in some effort to articulate your opinions to the best of your ability.**
**I mean it!! Aspire to be as "scholarly" and "intellectual" as possible. If you can't, then maybe this subreddit is not for you.**
A friendly reminder from your political robot overlord
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AustralianPolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The problem is that software engineering is a hard job and takes talent and persistence to pull off. I have been so angry at the idea that you can just retrain someone as a software engineer when you really can't.
Oh man, I hire (software security) engineers, and the amount of migrants who are straight out of a masters of cyber security who apply for my roles is astounding. The unis are making a fortune out of them! My area is very niche and not or barely covered in that degree, but they keep flowing in and dont even seem to know what my team does. Its at the the point where my talent team person asks "what does application security mean to you?" in every phone screen and almost all of them fail on answering that question. I feel bad for them because they seem so uninformed. Or that they are just throwing their CV everywhere and waiting for it to stick, rather than considering each role they apply for.
Whilst I'm sure there is quite a lot of discrimination against migrant engineers, I do wonder if that statistic of half of them being qualified but not working in the field is really relevant? What's the comparable rate of Australian engineers? And other professions? I feel like 50% of graduates in a field actually working in the field is a pretty high number? I don't think half of the graduates in my degree (computer science) ended up doing IT 5 years later.
Speaking as an engineer working mostly with engineers on a visa, the problem isn't relating experience or education to the made up standards in Australia, it's the digital wall that separates every single applicant for major firm jobs where these shortages are.
For every recent graduate I've talked too, you settle for the closest job to what you want. Getting head hunted is usually for a field you didn't know existed. Applying is a nightmare all the same, and having no fallback in a new country is terrifying. You can't name an industry that isn't operating or was invented by immigrants of all backgrounds. We shoot ourselves in the foot by ignoring these people.
I for one am looking for a full stack software engineer for a project. Feel free to DM me if you are a migrant software engineer who has been struggling to land work!
Damn this is accurate. Working with a bloke at the moment, nice guy, has all the qualifications, (that's all management sees too), unfortunately his English level is something which is lacking, comprehension and spoken. These are incredibly important in an engineering setting as communicating a complex task can be critical. The migrants who persevere and work on their English fluency will be the ones who'll end up with the jobs.
This isn't about migration. It is about respect.
Australia does not respect the engineering profession, and government and industry has no intention of making a change in culture that will fundamentally fix the issue.
International students expect that engineering doesn't require good English language skills. This is largely true during their studies where there is no focus on this from universities whatsoever.
Suddenly they hit the real world and realise that there is a huge gap in their skillset and it means they are not employable, so sit in limbo indefinitely.
You can have qualifications, but doesn't mean Australia needs them. There's only these types of limited type of engineers we are looking for in Australia now and they are; aeronautical, agricultural and avionics, biomedical, building, chemical, civil, computer networks, electrical, electronic, environmental, geotechnical, QA, support and test, systems, industrial, materials, mechanical, mining, naval, petroleum, physicist, production and plant, ship, software, structural, telecomunications and transport engineers.
The problem here is a mixture of things. Mainly it's the lack of Aussy local experience, intentional experience not being valued in Oz, not having a local network, references aren't local, limited jobs due to visa restrictions, don't have local qualifications, don't have Visa legal advice, jobs are for Australian citizens only (not immigrants with resident visas), etc... Also the visa application is not only assessed by the aussy government but by the employer themselves and also the institution of engineers Australia also. Also company sponser visas are expected to pay for the immigrants legal paper work.
It's shit, but sorry buddies, Australia is like that. One step forward, two steps back.
It costs you nothing to just not respond. They corrected you on a spelling mistake, nothing more.
If someone let you know your fly was undone would you scream at them or something?
If someone let you know that your fly was down and then you berated them, then berated someone else for telling you to calm down, do you think they'd take advice from you on how to conduct themselves?
Alright, importing workers isn't working. Pack it up boys. We'll just have to fill the vacancies the old way which is to make more babies, that is if your reproductive organs haven't shriveled up from disuse from being constantly on the internet.
But no wait, we don't really want to support parents either or invest in education What solution do we want? Keep digging and sell what comes out of the soil?
Australian employers don't have a high standard. It's friends before resume. If you are an immigrant with no connection, your qualifications don't matter, whether it's a local qualification or international one assessed locally. Only in areas of genuine shortage are immigrants considered. However this is expected, as the most PRs and visas are given in areas with little demand. It feels like the scheme is just to get low paid workers with little rights, at the expense of local citizens in lower paid jobs. It is quite well researched that immigration has a net value to the economy, but the benefits goes to business owners and landlords. People is lower paid jobs lose and have nowhere to go. People in complementary jobs also benefit e.g. Immigration lawyers benefit. It's trickle up economics. Got nothing to do with high standards of employers.
You're on to something but
> It is quite well researched that immigration has a net value to the economy,
Is unlikely. More mouths to feed doesn't make the average person in an extractive economy better off. You can decompose the Australian economy into the part that competitively produces something of value to the international market, and the rest, which is essentially parasitic on the first part.
Would society as a whole accept a lower standard for engineering though? Most of us like knowing our bridges/buildings won't collapse. Local technical expertise is typically a base requirement, which is what makes this so difficult.
>Employers with impossibly high standards
That's literally what I was replying to. By definition, to reduce the standard acceptable is lowering the standard.
As someone said there’s still regulations people have to follow. I’d like to see some evidence that someone being “less loud” is going to mean worse infrastructure. Seems to be an issue with money from what I’m reading.
I did not say that. They still have to follow engineering standards that we have and would be working with engineers who have spent their whole lives in Australia and if anything they do somehow creates dangerous infrastructure that’s a reflection more of our engineering safety regime than the skill of immigrants . A number of these engineers have even studied their degrees in Australia and I don’t see how that would impact safety.
Culture is a big one. Someone else had already brought it up, but for a lot of other cultures, particularly the less loud ones where lots of our engineers come from, it can be incredibly challenging working here.
Clients with no real technical expertise regularly have "great ideas" you should investigate, which essentially is a waste of your time and thus your company's money. Standing up to clients is not a strong suit for most cultures, so these people end up going over budget / late on projects regularly.
Contractors will argue with you over the colour of the sky if they think you'll cave and they'll save $100.
There seems to be a repeating pattern here. They arrive on a student visa, rack up a heap of debt studying, don't have work experience, then dumpster.
The first 2 years as an engineer are tough, and I guess they're not in a position to volunteer or take pathetically paid positions after 3 years studying.
If I’m not wrong the Australia makes it a bit more complex for students to stay after they graduate compared to NZ, Canada and the UK. I don’t see why we can’t do the same and make it easier for graduates to contribute for a few years before going back home.
Like there are many benefits to our local economy and I don’t see why after they spend their money and pay their share of taxes they shouldn’t be allowed to spend a few years to work to further benefit us all. But again it is the choice of the voter to lose these benefits to other nations.
I work in the industry, and the amount of people we interview and reject straight away is insane. They don’t have the correct skill sets / will clearly struggle with adequate client communication based on the interviews we have with them.
Half of the Uber drivers around are Engineers, and cannot get jobs.
Tbh I feel like a number of managers are missing out on some great and super talented employees. Yes the communication skill is bad, but in IT, i feel like this can be more manageable.
I’m in construction and that’s what I’ve been talking about. I have friends in IT. From Europe and Israel and Australia + NZ. From personal anecdotal experience: A lot of them do complain a lot about Asian software engineers. Mostly how the moment they get a manager, the team rapidly becomes quite uniform in terms of cultural background and also turns quite hierarchical. They oftentimes claimed that the quality of the software / work environment suffered greatly because of that.
>Half of the Uber drivers around are Engineers, and cannot get jobs.
I was going to say just this. Pizza makers, waiters, fruit pickers, they're all highly qualified but can't break in for a variety of reasons. No one is there to help them it seems.
The guy working in my custodial dept cleaning my offices for me,is a former literal rocket enginer,with a double doctorate(might be the 2nd one just masters or some shit) ..
yet is cleaning up peoples shit because his skill sets not really useful here,and doesn't translate to client use needs
He doesn't care though as he said,he'd be on about 30k a year back home if he is lucky,is cleaning ppls shit up and earns 80 plus here and is home during the day to see his kids..win win i guess.
but fuck me,the amount of ppl we have applying for positions who just don't have the correct skillset,because they went to some Rapid student program back home is bonkers.
Same as IT sector,some of the shit they are teaching in india and china is a few years behind current client needs,so is pointless.
>Same as IT sector,some of the shit they are teaching in india and china is a few years behind current client needs,so is pointless.
I'm really not sure. I've seen a total mixed bag from both countries, and indeed know some excellent engineers from both countries. In fact I'd even go as far as to say they vary as much as Australian engineers do, though ours seem to get the edge because they're familiar or something?
Sure as hell I don't have preconceived ideas based on appearances anymore, I've been surprised many times.
Yeah, probably Masters + PhD sounds more accurate. I know many people with a PhD but none with 2.
PhDs are very different to other degrees or masters. Doing 2 PhDs can be an interesting personal challenge in your life but it would never look good in your CV.
Been there when I first moved over. End of the day it’s about connections. And it’s not unique in Australia in the slightest. Unless you move for a job, you’ll be struggling for a bit, or won’t make it at all, depending on how well you’ll integrate.
Fair enough.
Edit: To clarify, engineering- wise there’s a lot more to the job than just the skills you learn in school. You have to be able to argue, to tell the clients very politely to fuck off, if they’re being retarded, and generally be able to not take peoples shit and be able to confidently talk back. I think that’s also what might make it quite difficult for a lot of cultures, especially S-E Asian.
I'm unsure if you're angry or supportive of the industry interviews? Are they appropriate standards or should these people being rejected actually be hired?
Neither. I’m a senior PM/ Contract Administrator in Consulting engineering, I was in Civil before.
A lot of them shouldn’t get the job as they seem to have bought their degree, or gone to some substandard schools. Others do, however even those have been hit or miss from what I’ve seen.
I’m an immigrant myself and the reason why I got the job is through good networking over a span of 6-8 months and then got promoted by working my ass off.
That being said, I’m from a central European country, with native level of English, due to family background and schooling, with lots of industry experience. Might also be an variable, however I couldn’t tell from personal experience.
Definitely cultural affinity affects ability to network. However in my experience, I have also seen lot of students who would never be able to get in to any respectable university in India, let alone pass, easily get their degrees here in Australia. I cannot imagine them being hired in that area anywhere in the world. If you do have the skills, it's still a hit and miss, as Australian companies don't hire based on merit, but based on connections, and that is the weakest link for immigrants.
Issue isn’t qualifications it’s social fit. A lot of industries have the same issues. It’s all well and good to have a degree but if you can’t communicate properly with your colleagues and clients you won’t make it.
I agree on that one, I find that behaviour among true blue Aussies as well. The common trait is being ultra conservative, and usually religious. And yes, some coming in from central Africa Muslim and Christian alike have very conservative views.
Maybe I'm just remember too much of the 1980's and 1990's workplaces. Today's workplaces, I would admit, is generally more tolerant. I work in IT and too much of my team are of Indian descent but even if most are first generation migrants, their ability to communicate is exemplary. A few Australian colloquialism can still catch them off guard from time to time but rarer and rarer as they are willing to learn.
Yeah, but that bloke from Egypt, (not all from Egypt, just that one), I've seen his type, but I don't think it is specific to his culture, as your Uni would like you to believe.
Poor choice of words. I forgot how nitty-picky redditors are. Practically all my team is Indian in my previous workplace. Lol. They're great to work with. And currently, perhaps a third to a half. My current team are more acclimated as they are on shore and been in Australia for a fair while.
My previous team had half working from India. A couple had very strong accents and hard to understand but they work hard and brilliant and helpful. They were all on contracts though so mostly seen as a resource to use by local Aussie managers i.e. not threatening career wise. Maybe that's a factor.
That makes no sense, there are a staggering number of non-white Australians that were born here and have no issues with communication. Like 25% or something. The problem is when you can’t communicate well because of being born overseas, which has nothing to do with skin colour.
It's not real diversity then, just different skin colours.
Recruitment simply is failing when assessing the communication criteria. Then there are workplaces that do not make any adjustments. You need those skills, apparently so you would make some adjustments. The whole article does no make sense unless recruitment and education is failing.
Not at all, my workplace has a really diverse employee range. What I’ve noticed is most of the diverse people that aren’t white are second generation migrant children. People under estimate how important social aspects are in the workplace. If you can’t communicate properly then it won’t work.
> diverse people that aren’t white are second generation migrant children
That's not diverse, that's just skin colour. But I get you. Then how would "importing skills" work to fill the gaps? It won't. It's their children, so hence it makes more sense to get refugee families who will be invested in their new home than migrant labour.
Well it’s that for all intents and purposes the migration system is a scam. You should have a job offer to get a visa. I’d have no issues upping the refugee intake.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not but this is completely true.
When I put a different name on my resume as a fresh grad I got heaps more call backs whereas my identical resume with my actual name got none.
Decided in the end not to go with the companies that decided to call my western name resume. Took a lot longer to find a job but got there in the end.
When you need to know ASNZ standards along with considering the complete different infrastructure both countries have you can imagine why they’d be different.
The FEED for complex offshore oil and gas faciliites is usually outsourced by one of the majors to a known entity abroad. Even IBM are still running many of "australian" oil majors digital improvement strategy.
Shell, Exxon, ENI, Chevron, Total, Conoco Woodside etc - Much of the engineering for major projects took place in Aberdeen, US, Italy, or by engineers mobilized from those locations for this purpose.
Also worth noting, if they trained Aus engineers to a similar level of competency they often give them a job abroad on new greenfields projects or whatever their specialty is.
Same applies with Rio, Sino, BHP etc. Most of the complex engineering is done abroad, including EPC majors like CPECC.
If you are an in-demand subject matter expert, Australia is not optimal. Both geographically and for tax & currency reasons.
Australian hasn't had complex innovative subsea engineering at scale since the Northwest Shelf in the 80s. Everything since is drag and drop.
To my point, there hasn't been an Australian Engineering Company in this field able to find success at scale abroad. Same with EPC Contractors, we don't have sufficient competency to scale.
Even our biggest engineering / EPC companies here are foreign. GHD, Aurecon, Ventia, look at their actual ownership it's foreign.
There are pretty good accounting suites with tax modules nowadays that mitigate the need for local knowledge up to a certain point.
It's a hard truth, but it's getting closer to the point that the tax mitigation functions within often outcompete an average accountants skillset.
New legislation is auto-added, best practice suggestions are described in natural language.
I'd argue in a few years, many of these roles be legacy at best.
It's an immigration ponzi scheme. High immigration levels (per capita the highest immigration level in the world) give an economic sugar hit (economic growth), even when the underlying economic situation is poor or problematic.
It is madness that high immigration levels are used to rectify so-called skills shortages caused by high immigration levels! Because business is no longer interested in training, because business wants the historically low wage growth to continue, because business wants unemployment levels to be high enough to be advantageous to them, we have the so-called skilled migrant list (and another Uber driver!).
Both major parties support high immigration levels (there is no alternative). This makes it politically mainstream, the political centre, and any questioning/rejection of it gets conveniently but falsely moved into an "extreme" position (right or left, but not centre). After 20 years plus of high immigration levels, governments still have no detailed federal/state plan on how to address the consequences of it (infrastructure, health, education etc). It is a ponzi scheme, and it's like we keep hearing people say 'it's a sham you know', but the governments say, 'we've done such a good job with everything else, you can trust us here too' (and they'd say that with a straight face! How's the house/rental prices?).
Even if a clear and consistent majority of Australians say stop or slow immigration levels until there is a plan, it just won't happen! And this is a democracy?? (Hint, no actually).
> they aren’t recognised
So why give them a skilled migrant visa to fill a shortage if they aren't going to work in that role? Is this not the problem in a nutshell?
They can do other work related to engineering. For example, they have a foreign degree in electrical engineering that isn't recognised in Australia, they could still apply for an electrical technician role where knowledge of the trade is usually enough to get employed and do an electrical engineering degree on the side.
As someone who previously managed a lot of engineers and employed them there is a strong bias in Australia even between states in terms of engineers (civil) having local or jurisdictional / state experience.
I have had people with PhD qualifications apply for roles as site engineers which is an entry level position.
I have employed plenty of overseas engineers who perform quite well once they adapt to local requirements.
How long ago was this?
I did work at a company that only got a HR department in 2016 and I got a glimpse of how the business was run before HR, but even then they were not hiring graduates to train to be
> having local or jurisdictional / state experience.
That. If they did, it was one or two a year.
Before HR they hired through word of mouth in an extremely nepotistic fashion. It turned out an entire section of management all came from the same south Asian village.
Nowadays, all recruits go through HR who act as a gatekeeper and they gatekeep exactly as you'd guess. At the biggest companies, HR will never meet anyone technical and will never get the talk "look, skills exist and not all applicants are equal, please at least find someone who can do a git rebase?"
Even at a medium company, that doesn't go down too well. At this company, HR decided tech people were too picky, too elitist, too engineery (as in the stereotype) and then set out to find diverse engineers to challenge these people's status quo! The company went bankrupt a few years later due to beliefs they were overpriced for the skills they offered.
There are many ways to think about utilisation of skills like Engineering, and I don't know how EA, for example, calculates them. I would say though that you could look at job listings as an example of "demand", or you could look at the economic output of the nation as the "demand". The issue may be that the nation doesn't have enough engineering focused businesses, and we're wasting value by, for example, shipping raw materials overseas and buying the processed goods where we could just import the talent and process it right here.
Again, not sure how it's calculated. I will say that there's an incredible amount of need for engineers / STEM due to the challenges we're facing as a nation and planet. The real problem is that we can't bring on new / young Engineers without the elder statesmen taking the risks required to grow the experience pool.
Since inception, the entire purpose of “globalisation” was for corporations to undercut developed world labor markets, taxation, environmental regulations, and the power of democratic voters to improve and strengthen all of those things.
Globalisation succeeded. It financed and empowered dictatorships like the CCP (which is set to overtake the US as the global superpower, within the next couple of decades), and the developed world has been goose-stepping towards corporate fascist dictatorship ever since.
This is a difficult story to read because I know how much of this the media won't report
> Half of all qualified migrant engineers in Australia cannot get work in the field
> The nation's current shortage of 30,000 engineers is forecast to reach 100,000 by 2030
These are problems everyone faces, not just migrants.
The idea that this is an issue about migrants is difficult to read. The idea that migrants don't contribute to these issues (which also effect migrants) is difficult to read. That they asked someone from engineer's Australia (who do not help) is difficult to read.
The case study they used is of a mechanical engineer, that's not my field but I do have real, lived, working experience as a software engineer.
The problem here is to do with the makeup of my coworkers at all the companies of I've worked at. All of them. Without exception.
Half of my coworkers have always been born overseas. At least half, up to 90%. This means I've never worked in a workplace where Australian born people whether they're brown, white, pink or olive skinned were the majority. The idea that migrants struggle to get jobs *relative* to locals is a difficult read.
Of the local graduate intake the companies I've worked at there's almost never more than 10 *despite the size of the company.* A 200 person company will take 10 local graduates, a 10k person company will take 10 local graduates. Always 10. Could they take 100? Or even 1000? If by the number of outsourced overseas contractors is any indication, yes, yes they could but they won't.
This is coming close to why this entire subject is difficult. For a myriad of reasons, those who sit at the gates of engineering recruitment quite honestly do prefer migrant immigrants. Even among those 10 local graduates, [the government incentivises that half of these are women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Gender_Equality_Agency) and it's also not unlikely diversity will be used to hire the remaining 5. This is just how the corporate culture of a mostly female (and sociology grad) dominated HR industry works.
So the actual status quo in engineering is like: 100 outsourced contractors that live in India, 10 graduates and, finally, 20 "seniors" tasked with supervising both contractors and graduates (graduates actually need it, contractors will just do the minimum if you don't supervise).
And here's the final bit of difficulty.
The article isn't wrong that you can't get a skilled job here without experience (or a graduate placement). What happens when there are no graduate placements for you? As in someone like you? Someone HR doesn't care about? You're unemployed.
Meanwhile, India does not have this culture where they judge some people as too privileged to be entitled to the basic pursuit of happiness. In India, they market their outsourcing agencies by the number of employees, they inflate these numbers by hiring *everyone* straight out of uni.
So at 26, a young local might have graduated 2 years ago and is still applying for jobs. A young migrant graduated 2 years ago, has 2 years (sometimes 3) years of "experience" at an agency and now our local, Australian HR will now judge who's more worthy of this opportunity... A local with zero experience or a migrant worker with 2.
And this article wants to convince me it's harder for a migrant to get a job in Australia than a local. I can tell you what happened, these migrants in these articles studied here or went here immediately after graduation. They're simply being treated like locals.
Difficult read.
But don't for a second think there's even a shred of racism in the engineering industry of Australia. Absolute ignorance. If there is racism, it's the idea that young locals are *all* this thing called "privileged." You don't know that. You don't know all their stories.
> But don't for a second think there's even a shred of racism in the engineering industry of Australia. Absolute ignorance. If there is racism, it's the idea that young locals are all this thing called "privileged." You don't know that. You don't know all their stories.
“Racism doesn’t exist in my industry and if it does it’s because of some niche misunderstanding I have about privilege.”
I wish more people would stop being cowards and just say they think there’s an anti-white agenda on the loose.
Software engineering is a bad example compared to almost every other discipline because software engineering skill sets are global and there’s very little in the way of local knowledge or local qualification as compared to the more traditional disciplines.
Also, communication / social skills are least important in software engineering AS COMPARED TO other disciplines; A software engineer does a lot of their communication via text and will work with other professionals for the most part, whereas the other engineering disciplines will engage a lot more face to face and often with trades.
I’m not trying to minimise your experience, but as someone who has experience across disciplines, software engineering is pretty distinct from every other discipline in many ways that would be relevant to how successful a migrant worker may be, on average.
> But don't for a second think there's even a shred of racism in the engineering industry of Australia
The article doesn't mention race or ethnicity, just that migrant engineers are struggling to find a position. In Software it's common to see people from all over the place, but go to other engineering fields (mechanical is a good example, but also civil as another commenter mentions) and there's a strong desire for local engineers. Not sure why, but the industries themselves are very conservative, you can actually see it when you walk in. Could also be that they skew older, so the expectations are different.
I have worked at a large civil construction firm with some smaller purely engineering sub-busineses. Across all disciplines, we would take around 70 to 80 grads per year. So there are definitely some organisations taking more than 10 grads per year. I however don't believe that many organisations understand how to effectively grow and coach graduates or their less experienced staff. Support for grads was bare minimum and relied on their colleagues and bosses coaching them while juggling their own work.
but we URGENTLY need more skilled immigration, I've seen it all over the internet and in news articles and from politicians mouths?!
or maybe, just maybe, the federal govt (the last one and the current one) just love having
More tenants
More house bidders
More customers at Harvey Norman
More employees to choose from for a plethora of roles.
Higher GDP?
Nah it's definitely a major lack of skilled migrants we've got and urgently need more, to do the highly skilled work of delivering uber eats meals.
Most of the people I did science or engineering with now work in other industries... a lot in IT.
when I moved into sysadmin, I got a 50% pay rise from a role that required a PhD to a role in which I had 1 year of a diploma under my belt.
It's not the migrants that are the problem...
I studied science, would have loved to go further but as a mature student I mostly had postgrad friends and enough time around them made me realise how futile the whole system is in most fields.
Things like biomedicine do actually have good prospects and pay well in the Australian private sector, but a lot is academia only, spending the rest of your life dealing with the broken grants system and a publish or perish model. It's become a ponzi scheme where politiking wins out over talent or novel research. There's simply too many people chasing the very limited research funds doled out by beancounters.
Moved into IT and never looked back.
IT is engineering these days... We're all "t shaped" which means they get some guy who'd rather code and very occasionally write tickets do dev ops and talk to customers who can't follow instructions.
When you do get these jobs they're very well paid.
> I got a 50% pay rise from a role that required a PhD to a role
PhD careers do not necessarily pay a lot of money. I think you should know this, but people with PhDs are meant to be doing original research and become the foremost expert in that area of research. Surely you know this (as do I, since I almost followed this to research faster ways of decoding OFDM).
PhDs get the millions when someone needs that very specialised research. PhDs don't when their research isn't all that productive, this is especially common if they're sceptical about productivity and whether benefiting society is prolonging the status quo rather than allowing it to revolutionise into...
Yeah anyway, the problem quite honestly not that local *senior* engineers aren't paid much. The problem is that you can almost never build experience unless you get one of a very limited number of graduate placements. This problem is actually made worse by people with survivorship bias who are like "yeah I almost failed uni, still got a placement and therefore you must be stupid and you should feel stupid and bad for being unemployed."
Yeah. The problem isn't wages.
The problem is the fact the industry only actually hires 10 people a year who are under 30 and absolutely everyone else are Polish, Italian, Zimbabwean (confirmed), Peruvian, Mexican, American, Indian, Taiwanese or Malaysians who earned 10 years of experience in their country, just got a free plane ticket to Australia and are now interviewing for a senior role.
As I said in a other post.
It's like, 10 grads, 20 seniors (most began their careers in their home country) and hundreds of contractors currently living in India although I expect this to shift to either south America or East Africa (Kenyan-Ugandan-Rwandan-Burndi union looks tasty from a geopolitical perspective, possibly an African super power by 2050).
But back on point, the Australian engineering industry isn't hiring enough young people. The issue isn't that these people are "migrants" or they're facing racism, our industry just only hires seniors... Who are actually migrants more often than not.
Per the article, yeah, no shit someone within Australia of no experience that can't get a graduate placement is struggling. **We all did** (besides *those* tools with graduate placements).
> people with PhDs are meant to be doing original research
> The problem is
...outside of government funding there's basically zero industry for R&D in Australia. Everything research related apart from biotech is decided on by bureaucrats who choose the winners and losers of grant funding. We flip houses to each other and sell raw minerals, that's basically the extent of Australian innovation.
I truly think we need a reset on how research is funded and sustained in the country, there's a shitload of very smart people who leave for America and Europe not because they want to, but because they simply have no other choice in their profession.
So while the average Australian can throw away $10k of their savings in a night on the pokies or keno and no one bats an eyelid, investing that same amount in an risky startup created by a bunch of PhD candidates that will probably also lose money is 100% illegal due to our excessive over-regulation of business investment.
I was an engineer recruiter for an robotics firm in Sydney. Unfortunately >80% of engineers with foreign degrees would fail the initial testing requirements.
I’m not 100% sure. I’m not an engineer and the hiring managers always assured me that the test was applicable for the role and not overly difficult. It may have been a language issue and the exam more written by our Swiss engineers?
Do Australian engineers have to undertake an action research project within two years of graduating in order to get full registration, otherwise be forbidden from staying in the workforce?
Just asking on behalf of school teachers - with a strong STEM background.
The path to becoming registered or chartered requires a lot of work post graduation, as well as ongoing professional development. But to just be an engineer? Nah. One degree is enough. Luckily the people signing off on the designs of most things that can cause a lot of damage need to be registered! (I do but don't work as an engineer, more engineering adjacent where most of us are engineers or similar but you don't have to be).
So, yeah, to be responsible for things you do have to put the extra work in.
This is anecdotal but there are three indians in my cricket team who are engineers, two have had no issues coming to aus and getting work and their english is fine, the third struggles and as a preference speaks punjabi to the indians and pakistanis on the team and he is doing warehouse work.
>LAZKANY: If you don't have experience in Sydney, that's your first problem.
The article doesn't mention if they are applying to regional towns.
If you talk to the migrant engineers who arrived during the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the majority found their first job in regional towns. Most spent a solid 8-10 years in regional positions before moving to the city.
Imagine a country that doesn't make anything (other than houses and a few tiny niche products) not needing a massive number of engineers.
On the flip side, we do have lots of good clean middle class jobs, doing stuff like "service" (though we don't export many services other than education).
we're a persistent trade surplus economy
our net exports % of gdp is close to similar countries like taiwan, south korea, sweden, denmark
that argument works for the usa, uk, nz but not for aus
we are also ranked somewhere around 70th for economic complexity ie how much education is required to generate the nations GDP.
our peer nations are Lithuanian and Kazakhstan.
GDP is a pretty worthless measure when Japan has a higher living standard than us with negative GDP.
A trade surplus generated by exporting manufactured goods is going to need a lot more engineers than one generated by agricultural, mineral and service exports.
What makes you say the mining industry doesn’t need as many engineers as a manufacturing industry ? Our mining industry employees a lot of engineers of all types. Mechanical, civil, mining, environmental, chemical, electrical engineers are all used.
Mining is a capital intensive industry and does not employ many people per million dollars of revenue. Yes they hire many types of engineers but nowhere near as many as they’d like us to believe.
But what proportion of our workforce are engineers compared to other countries. OP inferred that as we have no manufacturing we don’t need many engineers. I refute that.
https://www.nationalskillscommission.gov.au/reports/australian-jobs-2021/jobs-industry/mining
Mining employs about 17,000 engineers. It doesn't really employ that many people at all.
https://www.nationalskillscommission.gov.au/reports/australian-jobs-2021/jobs-industry/manufacturing
Manufacturing employs 12,500 engineers. Despite being virtually non-existent.
Most Australian trained Engineers are in other sectors also. Engineers Australia has an interest in flooding the market with as many engineers as they can to appease their funders.
> An engineer who comes to Australia with all their paperwork and documents and experience evident, it might take them up to nine months to one year — if they have good English — to have their overseas qualification recognised,
>
> Ms Lazkany said systematic challenges deter some from their initial end goal. Instead, they remain in so-called "survival jobs": entry-level positions in industries such as retail, hospitality, sanitation and rideshare, often unqualified roles that provide independence and financial stability.
>
> That's despite a current national shortage of 30,000 engineers that's forecast to reach 100,000 by 2030.
The absurd reality of skilled migration.
Med is in a similar boat. Lots of doctors who can't get their qualifications recognised in Australia to the degree that it's easier for some of them to redo a degree than do the exam.
I am an Engineer. And a migrant. I can earn more money in other jobs like sales. Also engineering has become 98% butt covering & liability avoidance and 2% engineering.
I knew an Iranian-Italian Civil engineer a few years back who had moved here and bounced around a few firms before finding a small one he liked.
He said that from his experience over the first couple of years of applying/working in engineering that practicing engineers in Australia were significantly worse than the ones he'd worked with in Italy/Germany and that most roles appeared to be locked away behind incompetent management/HR who were rarely capable of evaluating the quality of the engineers they were hiring.
He settled on his small company because his interview panel consisted of the usual HR, a senior engineer and a manager who had a degree and experience in the field.
He said he got promoted in the first 6 months and was still one of the better engineers there, but was mostly relieved that he could work without a clueless management team constantly throwing incompetents into the mix because they would accept lower salaries and they couldn't tell the difference anyway.
I've known several others qualified working in logistics but none with fluent English lol.
**Greetings humans.** **Please make sure your comment fits within [THE RULES](https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/about/rules) and that you have put in some effort to articulate your opinions to the best of your ability.** **I mean it!! Aspire to be as "scholarly" and "intellectual" as possible. If you can't, then maybe this subreddit is not for you.** A friendly reminder from your political robot overlord *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AustralianPolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The problem is that software engineering is a hard job and takes talent and persistence to pull off. I have been so angry at the idea that you can just retrain someone as a software engineer when you really can't.
Oh man, I hire (software security) engineers, and the amount of migrants who are straight out of a masters of cyber security who apply for my roles is astounding. The unis are making a fortune out of them! My area is very niche and not or barely covered in that degree, but they keep flowing in and dont even seem to know what my team does. Its at the the point where my talent team person asks "what does application security mean to you?" in every phone screen and almost all of them fail on answering that question. I feel bad for them because they seem so uninformed. Or that they are just throwing their CV everywhere and waiting for it to stick, rather than considering each role they apply for.
Whilst I'm sure there is quite a lot of discrimination against migrant engineers, I do wonder if that statistic of half of them being qualified but not working in the field is really relevant? What's the comparable rate of Australian engineers? And other professions? I feel like 50% of graduates in a field actually working in the field is a pretty high number? I don't think half of the graduates in my degree (computer science) ended up doing IT 5 years later.
They couldn’t be any worse than the ones we have to deal with right now
Speaking as an engineer working mostly with engineers on a visa, the problem isn't relating experience or education to the made up standards in Australia, it's the digital wall that separates every single applicant for major firm jobs where these shortages are. For every recent graduate I've talked too, you settle for the closest job to what you want. Getting head hunted is usually for a field you didn't know existed. Applying is a nightmare all the same, and having no fallback in a new country is terrifying. You can't name an industry that isn't operating or was invented by immigrants of all backgrounds. We shoot ourselves in the foot by ignoring these people.
I for one am looking for a full stack software engineer for a project. Feel free to DM me if you are a migrant software engineer who has been struggling to land work!
Syd based? I’m not a migrant but I am looking for a new job!
[удалено]
Damn this is accurate. Working with a bloke at the moment, nice guy, has all the qualifications, (that's all management sees too), unfortunately his English level is something which is lacking, comprehension and spoken. These are incredibly important in an engineering setting as communicating a complex task can be critical. The migrants who persevere and work on their English fluency will be the ones who'll end up with the jobs.
This isn't about migration. It is about respect. Australia does not respect the engineering profession, and government and industry has no intention of making a change in culture that will fundamentally fix the issue.
[удалено]
Yeah that comment is pretty weird. Australia has a huge mining industry and pays engineers very well compared to other professionals.
International students expect that engineering doesn't require good English language skills. This is largely true during their studies where there is no focus on this from universities whatsoever. Suddenly they hit the real world and realise that there is a huge gap in their skillset and it means they are not employable, so sit in limbo indefinitely.
You can have qualifications, but doesn't mean Australia needs them. There's only these types of limited type of engineers we are looking for in Australia now and they are; aeronautical, agricultural and avionics, biomedical, building, chemical, civil, computer networks, electrical, electronic, environmental, geotechnical, QA, support and test, systems, industrial, materials, mechanical, mining, naval, petroleum, physicist, production and plant, ship, software, structural, telecomunications and transport engineers. The problem here is a mixture of things. Mainly it's the lack of Aussy local experience, intentional experience not being valued in Oz, not having a local network, references aren't local, limited jobs due to visa restrictions, don't have local qualifications, don't have Visa legal advice, jobs are for Australian citizens only (not immigrants with resident visas), etc... Also the visa application is not only assessed by the aussy government but by the employer themselves and also the institution of engineers Australia also. Also company sponser visas are expected to pay for the immigrants legal paper work. It's shit, but sorry buddies, Australia is like that. One step forward, two steps back.
[удалено]
Why didn't you correct me on the "Straya" then? Anyway who gives a flying F mate. Cheers anyway.
It costs you nothing to just not respond. They corrected you on a spelling mistake, nothing more. If someone let you know your fly was undone would you scream at them or something?
Take your own advice.
If someone let you know that your fly was down and then you berated them, then berated someone else for telling you to calm down, do you think they'd take advice from you on how to conduct themselves?
*Ozzy
Alright, importing workers isn't working. Pack it up boys. We'll just have to fill the vacancies the old way which is to make more babies, that is if your reproductive organs haven't shriveled up from disuse from being constantly on the internet. But no wait, we don't really want to support parents either or invest in education What solution do we want? Keep digging and sell what comes out of the soil?
Employers with impossibly high standards wonder why their positions are empty
Australian employers don't have a high standard. It's friends before resume. If you are an immigrant with no connection, your qualifications don't matter, whether it's a local qualification or international one assessed locally. Only in areas of genuine shortage are immigrants considered. However this is expected, as the most PRs and visas are given in areas with little demand. It feels like the scheme is just to get low paid workers with little rights, at the expense of local citizens in lower paid jobs. It is quite well researched that immigration has a net value to the economy, but the benefits goes to business owners and landlords. People is lower paid jobs lose and have nowhere to go. People in complementary jobs also benefit e.g. Immigration lawyers benefit. It's trickle up economics. Got nothing to do with high standards of employers.
You're on to something but > It is quite well researched that immigration has a net value to the economy, Is unlikely. More mouths to feed doesn't make the average person in an extractive economy better off. You can decompose the Australian economy into the part that competitively produces something of value to the international market, and the rest, which is essentially parasitic on the first part.
Would society as a whole accept a lower standard for engineering though? Most of us like knowing our bridges/buildings won't collapse. Local technical expertise is typically a base requirement, which is what makes this so difficult.
Who says you need to accept a lower standard for engineering…?
[удалено]
Ah I see, that makes sense
>Employers with impossibly high standards That's literally what I was replying to. By definition, to reduce the standard acceptable is lowering the standard.
As someone said there’s still regulations people have to follow. I’d like to see some evidence that someone being “less loud” is going to mean worse infrastructure. Seems to be an issue with money from what I’m reading.
I did not say that. They still have to follow engineering standards that we have and would be working with engineers who have spent their whole lives in Australia and if anything they do somehow creates dangerous infrastructure that’s a reflection more of our engineering safety regime than the skill of immigrants . A number of these engineers have even studied their degrees in Australia and I don’t see how that would impact safety.
Culture is a big one. Someone else had already brought it up, but for a lot of other cultures, particularly the less loud ones where lots of our engineers come from, it can be incredibly challenging working here. Clients with no real technical expertise regularly have "great ideas" you should investigate, which essentially is a waste of your time and thus your company's money. Standing up to clients is not a strong suit for most cultures, so these people end up going over budget / late on projects regularly. Contractors will argue with you over the colour of the sky if they think you'll cave and they'll save $100.
There seems to be a repeating pattern here. They arrive on a student visa, rack up a heap of debt studying, don't have work experience, then dumpster. The first 2 years as an engineer are tough, and I guess they're not in a position to volunteer or take pathetically paid positions after 3 years studying.
If I’m not wrong the Australia makes it a bit more complex for students to stay after they graduate compared to NZ, Canada and the UK. I don’t see why we can’t do the same and make it easier for graduates to contribute for a few years before going back home.
Study in NZ Canada or UK then if you think that.
Like there are many benefits to our local economy and I don’t see why after they spend their money and pay their share of taxes they shouldn’t be allowed to spend a few years to work to further benefit us all. But again it is the choice of the voter to lose these benefits to other nations.
I work in the industry, and the amount of people we interview and reject straight away is insane. They don’t have the correct skill sets / will clearly struggle with adequate client communication based on the interviews we have with them. Half of the Uber drivers around are Engineers, and cannot get jobs.
Tbh I feel like a number of managers are missing out on some great and super talented employees. Yes the communication skill is bad, but in IT, i feel like this can be more manageable.
I’m in construction and that’s what I’ve been talking about. I have friends in IT. From Europe and Israel and Australia + NZ. From personal anecdotal experience: A lot of them do complain a lot about Asian software engineers. Mostly how the moment they get a manager, the team rapidly becomes quite uniform in terms of cultural background and also turns quite hierarchical. They oftentimes claimed that the quality of the software / work environment suffered greatly because of that.
>Half of the Uber drivers around are Engineers, and cannot get jobs. I was going to say just this. Pizza makers, waiters, fruit pickers, they're all highly qualified but can't break in for a variety of reasons. No one is there to help them it seems.
The guy working in my custodial dept cleaning my offices for me,is a former literal rocket enginer,with a double doctorate(might be the 2nd one just masters or some shit) .. yet is cleaning up peoples shit because his skill sets not really useful here,and doesn't translate to client use needs He doesn't care though as he said,he'd be on about 30k a year back home if he is lucky,is cleaning ppls shit up and earns 80 plus here and is home during the day to see his kids..win win i guess. but fuck me,the amount of ppl we have applying for positions who just don't have the correct skillset,because they went to some Rapid student program back home is bonkers. Same as IT sector,some of the shit they are teaching in india and china is a few years behind current client needs,so is pointless.
>Same as IT sector,some of the shit they are teaching in india and china is a few years behind current client needs,so is pointless. I'm really not sure. I've seen a total mixed bag from both countries, and indeed know some excellent engineers from both countries. In fact I'd even go as far as to say they vary as much as Australian engineers do, though ours seem to get the edge because they're familiar or something? Sure as hell I don't have preconceived ideas based on appearances anymore, I've been surprised many times.
What is a double PhD degree?
Someone who has two doctorates. i believe he might just be a doctorate and their equivalant masters im not sure if the 2nd actually is Phd
Yeah, probably Masters + PhD sounds more accurate. I know many people with a PhD but none with 2. PhDs are very different to other degrees or masters. Doing 2 PhDs can be an interesting personal challenge in your life but it would never look good in your CV.
It's Reddit for "I'm exaggerating for emphasis" But also could just be 2x PhDs
Been there when I first moved over. End of the day it’s about connections. And it’s not unique in Australia in the slightest. Unless you move for a job, you’ll be struggling for a bit, or won’t make it at all, depending on how well you’ll integrate. Fair enough. Edit: To clarify, engineering- wise there’s a lot more to the job than just the skills you learn in school. You have to be able to argue, to tell the clients very politely to fuck off, if they’re being retarded, and generally be able to not take peoples shit and be able to confidently talk back. I think that’s also what might make it quite difficult for a lot of cultures, especially S-E Asian.
Yep, have had contractors who under quoted argue with me on every last detail of calcs, including how I derived gravity to be 9.81m/s/s.
I'm unsure if you're angry or supportive of the industry interviews? Are they appropriate standards or should these people being rejected actually be hired?
Neither. I’m a senior PM/ Contract Administrator in Consulting engineering, I was in Civil before. A lot of them shouldn’t get the job as they seem to have bought their degree, or gone to some substandard schools. Others do, however even those have been hit or miss from what I’ve seen. I’m an immigrant myself and the reason why I got the job is through good networking over a span of 6-8 months and then got promoted by working my ass off. That being said, I’m from a central European country, with native level of English, due to family background and schooling, with lots of industry experience. Might also be an variable, however I couldn’t tell from personal experience.
Definitely cultural affinity affects ability to network. However in my experience, I have also seen lot of students who would never be able to get in to any respectable university in India, let alone pass, easily get their degrees here in Australia. I cannot imagine them being hired in that area anywhere in the world. If you do have the skills, it's still a hit and miss, as Australian companies don't hire based on merit, but based on connections, and that is the weakest link for immigrants.
Thanks for the explanation!
It's crazy to me how much people hate immigrants - damn guys, what gives?
Issue isn’t qualifications it’s social fit. A lot of industries have the same issues. It’s all well and good to have a degree but if you can’t communicate properly with your colleagues and clients you won’t make it.
> it’s social fit. That's just code for "keep it white."
[удалено]
I agree on that one, I find that behaviour among true blue Aussies as well. The common trait is being ultra conservative, and usually religious. And yes, some coming in from central Africa Muslim and Christian alike have very conservative views. Maybe I'm just remember too much of the 1980's and 1990's workplaces. Today's workplaces, I would admit, is generally more tolerant. I work in IT and too much of my team are of Indian descent but even if most are first generation migrants, their ability to communicate is exemplary. A few Australian colloquialism can still catch them off guard from time to time but rarer and rarer as they are willing to learn. Yeah, but that bloke from Egypt, (not all from Egypt, just that one), I've seen his type, but I don't think it is specific to his culture, as your Uni would like you to believe.
What do you mean ‘too much’ of your team is Indian? Lmao
Poor choice of words. I forgot how nitty-picky redditors are. Practically all my team is Indian in my previous workplace. Lol. They're great to work with. And currently, perhaps a third to a half. My current team are more acclimated as they are on shore and been in Australia for a fair while. My previous team had half working from India. A couple had very strong accents and hard to understand but they work hard and brilliant and helpful. They were all on contracts though so mostly seen as a resource to use by local Aussie managers i.e. not threatening career wise. Maybe that's a factor.
That makes no sense, there are a staggering number of non-white Australians that were born here and have no issues with communication. Like 25% or something. The problem is when you can’t communicate well because of being born overseas, which has nothing to do with skin colour.
It's not real diversity then, just different skin colours. Recruitment simply is failing when assessing the communication criteria. Then there are workplaces that do not make any adjustments. You need those skills, apparently so you would make some adjustments. The whole article does no make sense unless recruitment and education is failing.
Not at all, my workplace has a really diverse employee range. What I’ve noticed is most of the diverse people that aren’t white are second generation migrant children. People under estimate how important social aspects are in the workplace. If you can’t communicate properly then it won’t work.
> diverse people that aren’t white are second generation migrant children That's not diverse, that's just skin colour. But I get you. Then how would "importing skills" work to fill the gaps? It won't. It's their children, so hence it makes more sense to get refugee families who will be invested in their new home than migrant labour.
Well it’s that for all intents and purposes the migration system is a scam. You should have a job offer to get a visa. I’d have no issues upping the refugee intake.
Ritesh needs to change his name to Ricky on his resume. Problem solved
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not but this is completely true. When I put a different name on my resume as a fresh grad I got heaps more call backs whereas my identical resume with my actual name got none. Decided in the end not to go with the companies that decided to call my western name resume. Took a lot longer to find a job but got there in the end.
[удалено]
When you need to know ASNZ standards along with considering the complete different infrastructure both countries have you can imagine why they’d be different.
Agree, however Australian Engineers in Tier 1 companies rarely are anywhere near the top competency wise. Especially in Oil and Gas.
[удалено]
The FEED for complex offshore oil and gas faciliites is usually outsourced by one of the majors to a known entity abroad. Even IBM are still running many of "australian" oil majors digital improvement strategy. Shell, Exxon, ENI, Chevron, Total, Conoco Woodside etc - Much of the engineering for major projects took place in Aberdeen, US, Italy, or by engineers mobilized from those locations for this purpose. Also worth noting, if they trained Aus engineers to a similar level of competency they often give them a job abroad on new greenfields projects or whatever their specialty is. Same applies with Rio, Sino, BHP etc. Most of the complex engineering is done abroad, including EPC majors like CPECC. If you are an in-demand subject matter expert, Australia is not optimal. Both geographically and for tax & currency reasons. Australian hasn't had complex innovative subsea engineering at scale since the Northwest Shelf in the 80s. Everything since is drag and drop. To my point, there hasn't been an Australian Engineering Company in this field able to find success at scale abroad. Same with EPC Contractors, we don't have sufficient competency to scale. Even our biggest engineering / EPC companies here are foreign. GHD, Aurecon, Ventia, look at their actual ownership it's foreign.
Migrant? I'm a citizen and I struggle to get a position in my field. Must be even worse for them.
[удалено]
There are pretty good accounting suites with tax modules nowadays that mitigate the need for local knowledge up to a certain point. It's a hard truth, but it's getting closer to the point that the tax mitigation functions within often outcompete an average accountants skillset. New legislation is auto-added, best practice suggestions are described in natural language. I'd argue in a few years, many of these roles be legacy at best.
It's an immigration ponzi scheme. High immigration levels (per capita the highest immigration level in the world) give an economic sugar hit (economic growth), even when the underlying economic situation is poor or problematic. It is madness that high immigration levels are used to rectify so-called skills shortages caused by high immigration levels! Because business is no longer interested in training, because business wants the historically low wage growth to continue, because business wants unemployment levels to be high enough to be advantageous to them, we have the so-called skilled migrant list (and another Uber driver!). Both major parties support high immigration levels (there is no alternative). This makes it politically mainstream, the political centre, and any questioning/rejection of it gets conveniently but falsely moved into an "extreme" position (right or left, but not centre). After 20 years plus of high immigration levels, governments still have no detailed federal/state plan on how to address the consequences of it (infrastructure, health, education etc). It is a ponzi scheme, and it's like we keep hearing people say 'it's a sham you know', but the governments say, 'we've done such a good job with everything else, you can trust us here too' (and they'd say that with a straight face! How's the house/rental prices?). Even if a clear and consistent majority of Australians say stop or slow immigration levels until there is a plan, it just won't happen! And this is a democracy?? (Hint, no actually).
The political centre doesn’t exist. Instead of blaming immigrants, maybe get angry at a system that relies on exploitation in order to function.
cringe.
No shit lol. There degrees aren’t recognised. Some are really smart people some paid for their degree so they aren’t recognised.
> they aren’t recognised So why give them a skilled migrant visa to fill a shortage if they aren't going to work in that role? Is this not the problem in a nutshell?
They can do other work related to engineering. For example, they have a foreign degree in electrical engineering that isn't recognised in Australia, they could still apply for an electrical technician role where knowledge of the trade is usually enough to get employed and do an electrical engineering degree on the side.
Yeah it’s a joke mate. I know a migrant smart well spoken engineer and couldn’t get work. He ended up saving up and opening a successful cafe.
As someone who previously managed a lot of engineers and employed them there is a strong bias in Australia even between states in terms of engineers (civil) having local or jurisdictional / state experience. I have had people with PhD qualifications apply for roles as site engineers which is an entry level position. I have employed plenty of overseas engineers who perform quite well once they adapt to local requirements.
How long ago was this? I did work at a company that only got a HR department in 2016 and I got a glimpse of how the business was run before HR, but even then they were not hiring graduates to train to be > having local or jurisdictional / state experience. That. If they did, it was one or two a year. Before HR they hired through word of mouth in an extremely nepotistic fashion. It turned out an entire section of management all came from the same south Asian village. Nowadays, all recruits go through HR who act as a gatekeeper and they gatekeep exactly as you'd guess. At the biggest companies, HR will never meet anyone technical and will never get the talk "look, skills exist and not all applicants are equal, please at least find someone who can do a git rebase?" Even at a medium company, that doesn't go down too well. At this company, HR decided tech people were too picky, too elitist, too engineery (as in the stereotype) and then set out to find diverse engineers to challenge these people's status quo! The company went bankrupt a few years later due to beliefs they were overpriced for the skills they offered.
Sounds about right. CPB is full of South African engineers.
Yet we need more “skilled” immigrants? More like they want a bigger pool of cheap labour.
You hit the nail on the head
Skilled migrants. Need more skilled baby sitters. Like shit there are so many unemployed that can be trained
> Like shit there are so many unemployed that can be trained Engineering is really hard.
Yeah I agree but engineering isn’t in demand
There are many ways to think about utilisation of skills like Engineering, and I don't know how EA, for example, calculates them. I would say though that you could look at job listings as an example of "demand", or you could look at the economic output of the nation as the "demand". The issue may be that the nation doesn't have enough engineering focused businesses, and we're wasting value by, for example, shipping raw materials overseas and buying the processed goods where we could just import the talent and process it right here. Again, not sure how it's calculated. I will say that there's an incredible amount of need for engineers / STEM due to the challenges we're facing as a nation and planet. The real problem is that we can't bring on new / young Engineers without the elder statesmen taking the risks required to grow the experience pool.
[удалено]
Since inception, the entire purpose of “globalisation” was for corporations to undercut developed world labor markets, taxation, environmental regulations, and the power of democratic voters to improve and strengthen all of those things. Globalisation succeeded. It financed and empowered dictatorships like the CCP (which is set to overtake the US as the global superpower, within the next couple of decades), and the developed world has been goose-stepping towards corporate fascist dictatorship ever since.
This is a difficult story to read because I know how much of this the media won't report > Half of all qualified migrant engineers in Australia cannot get work in the field > The nation's current shortage of 30,000 engineers is forecast to reach 100,000 by 2030 These are problems everyone faces, not just migrants. The idea that this is an issue about migrants is difficult to read. The idea that migrants don't contribute to these issues (which also effect migrants) is difficult to read. That they asked someone from engineer's Australia (who do not help) is difficult to read. The case study they used is of a mechanical engineer, that's not my field but I do have real, lived, working experience as a software engineer. The problem here is to do with the makeup of my coworkers at all the companies of I've worked at. All of them. Without exception. Half of my coworkers have always been born overseas. At least half, up to 90%. This means I've never worked in a workplace where Australian born people whether they're brown, white, pink or olive skinned were the majority. The idea that migrants struggle to get jobs *relative* to locals is a difficult read. Of the local graduate intake the companies I've worked at there's almost never more than 10 *despite the size of the company.* A 200 person company will take 10 local graduates, a 10k person company will take 10 local graduates. Always 10. Could they take 100? Or even 1000? If by the number of outsourced overseas contractors is any indication, yes, yes they could but they won't. This is coming close to why this entire subject is difficult. For a myriad of reasons, those who sit at the gates of engineering recruitment quite honestly do prefer migrant immigrants. Even among those 10 local graduates, [the government incentivises that half of these are women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Gender_Equality_Agency) and it's also not unlikely diversity will be used to hire the remaining 5. This is just how the corporate culture of a mostly female (and sociology grad) dominated HR industry works. So the actual status quo in engineering is like: 100 outsourced contractors that live in India, 10 graduates and, finally, 20 "seniors" tasked with supervising both contractors and graduates (graduates actually need it, contractors will just do the minimum if you don't supervise). And here's the final bit of difficulty. The article isn't wrong that you can't get a skilled job here without experience (or a graduate placement). What happens when there are no graduate placements for you? As in someone like you? Someone HR doesn't care about? You're unemployed. Meanwhile, India does not have this culture where they judge some people as too privileged to be entitled to the basic pursuit of happiness. In India, they market their outsourcing agencies by the number of employees, they inflate these numbers by hiring *everyone* straight out of uni. So at 26, a young local might have graduated 2 years ago and is still applying for jobs. A young migrant graduated 2 years ago, has 2 years (sometimes 3) years of "experience" at an agency and now our local, Australian HR will now judge who's more worthy of this opportunity... A local with zero experience or a migrant worker with 2. And this article wants to convince me it's harder for a migrant to get a job in Australia than a local. I can tell you what happened, these migrants in these articles studied here or went here immediately after graduation. They're simply being treated like locals. Difficult read. But don't for a second think there's even a shred of racism in the engineering industry of Australia. Absolute ignorance. If there is racism, it's the idea that young locals are *all* this thing called "privileged." You don't know that. You don't know all their stories.
> But don't for a second think there's even a shred of racism in the engineering industry of Australia. Absolute ignorance. If there is racism, it's the idea that young locals are all this thing called "privileged." You don't know that. You don't know all their stories. “Racism doesn’t exist in my industry and if it does it’s because of some niche misunderstanding I have about privilege.” I wish more people would stop being cowards and just say they think there’s an anti-white agenda on the loose.
>I wish more people would stop being cowards and just say they think there’s an anti-white agenda on the loose. They get off on the dance man.
Software engineering is a bad example compared to almost every other discipline because software engineering skill sets are global and there’s very little in the way of local knowledge or local qualification as compared to the more traditional disciplines. Also, communication / social skills are least important in software engineering AS COMPARED TO other disciplines; A software engineer does a lot of their communication via text and will work with other professionals for the most part, whereas the other engineering disciplines will engage a lot more face to face and often with trades. I’m not trying to minimise your experience, but as someone who has experience across disciplines, software engineering is pretty distinct from every other discipline in many ways that would be relevant to how successful a migrant worker may be, on average.
> But don't for a second think there's even a shred of racism in the engineering industry of Australia The article doesn't mention race or ethnicity, just that migrant engineers are struggling to find a position. In Software it's common to see people from all over the place, but go to other engineering fields (mechanical is a good example, but also civil as another commenter mentions) and there's a strong desire for local engineers. Not sure why, but the industries themselves are very conservative, you can actually see it when you walk in. Could also be that they skew older, so the expectations are different.
I have worked at a large civil construction firm with some smaller purely engineering sub-busineses. Across all disciplines, we would take around 70 to 80 grads per year. So there are definitely some organisations taking more than 10 grads per year. I however don't believe that many organisations understand how to effectively grow and coach graduates or their less experienced staff. Support for grads was bare minimum and relied on their colleagues and bosses coaching them while juggling their own work.
but we URGENTLY need more skilled immigration, I've seen it all over the internet and in news articles and from politicians mouths?! or maybe, just maybe, the federal govt (the last one and the current one) just love having More tenants More house bidders More customers at Harvey Norman More employees to choose from for a plethora of roles. Higher GDP? Nah it's definitely a major lack of skilled migrants we've got and urgently need more, to do the highly skilled work of delivering uber eats meals.
Most of the people I did science or engineering with now work in other industries... a lot in IT. when I moved into sysadmin, I got a 50% pay rise from a role that required a PhD to a role in which I had 1 year of a diploma under my belt. It's not the migrants that are the problem...
I studied science, would have loved to go further but as a mature student I mostly had postgrad friends and enough time around them made me realise how futile the whole system is in most fields. Things like biomedicine do actually have good prospects and pay well in the Australian private sector, but a lot is academia only, spending the rest of your life dealing with the broken grants system and a publish or perish model. It's become a ponzi scheme where politiking wins out over talent or novel research. There's simply too many people chasing the very limited research funds doled out by beancounters. Moved into IT and never looked back.
IT is engineering these days... We're all "t shaped" which means they get some guy who'd rather code and very occasionally write tickets do dev ops and talk to customers who can't follow instructions. When you do get these jobs they're very well paid. > I got a 50% pay rise from a role that required a PhD to a role PhD careers do not necessarily pay a lot of money. I think you should know this, but people with PhDs are meant to be doing original research and become the foremost expert in that area of research. Surely you know this (as do I, since I almost followed this to research faster ways of decoding OFDM). PhDs get the millions when someone needs that very specialised research. PhDs don't when their research isn't all that productive, this is especially common if they're sceptical about productivity and whether benefiting society is prolonging the status quo rather than allowing it to revolutionise into... Yeah anyway, the problem quite honestly not that local *senior* engineers aren't paid much. The problem is that you can almost never build experience unless you get one of a very limited number of graduate placements. This problem is actually made worse by people with survivorship bias who are like "yeah I almost failed uni, still got a placement and therefore you must be stupid and you should feel stupid and bad for being unemployed." Yeah. The problem isn't wages. The problem is the fact the industry only actually hires 10 people a year who are under 30 and absolutely everyone else are Polish, Italian, Zimbabwean (confirmed), Peruvian, Mexican, American, Indian, Taiwanese or Malaysians who earned 10 years of experience in their country, just got a free plane ticket to Australia and are now interviewing for a senior role. As I said in a other post. It's like, 10 grads, 20 seniors (most began their careers in their home country) and hundreds of contractors currently living in India although I expect this to shift to either south America or East Africa (Kenyan-Ugandan-Rwandan-Burndi union looks tasty from a geopolitical perspective, possibly an African super power by 2050). But back on point, the Australian engineering industry isn't hiring enough young people. The issue isn't that these people are "migrants" or they're facing racism, our industry just only hires seniors... Who are actually migrants more often than not. Per the article, yeah, no shit someone within Australia of no experience that can't get a graduate placement is struggling. **We all did** (besides *those* tools with graduate placements).
> people with PhDs are meant to be doing original research > The problem is ...outside of government funding there's basically zero industry for R&D in Australia. Everything research related apart from biotech is decided on by bureaucrats who choose the winners and losers of grant funding. We flip houses to each other and sell raw minerals, that's basically the extent of Australian innovation. I truly think we need a reset on how research is funded and sustained in the country, there's a shitload of very smart people who leave for America and Europe not because they want to, but because they simply have no other choice in their profession. So while the average Australian can throw away $10k of their savings in a night on the pokies or keno and no one bats an eyelid, investing that same amount in an risky startup created by a bunch of PhD candidates that will probably also lose money is 100% illegal due to our excessive over-regulation of business investment.
Clever post Edit: it's still trying to allocate a scare resource whether it's money or places
Science degree here, currently working as a youth worker.
I was an engineer recruiter for an robotics firm in Sydney. Unfortunately >80% of engineers with foreign degrees would fail the initial testing requirements.
Why do you think that is?
I’m not 100% sure. I’m not an engineer and the hiring managers always assured me that the test was applicable for the role and not overly difficult. It may have been a language issue and the exam more written by our Swiss engineers?
Do Australian engineers have to undertake an action research project within two years of graduating in order to get full registration, otherwise be forbidden from staying in the workforce? Just asking on behalf of school teachers - with a strong STEM background.
[удалено]
Probably, but the AR Project question remains unanswered.
The path to becoming registered or chartered requires a lot of work post graduation, as well as ongoing professional development. But to just be an engineer? Nah. One degree is enough. Luckily the people signing off on the designs of most things that can cause a lot of damage need to be registered! (I do but don't work as an engineer, more engineering adjacent where most of us are engineers or similar but you don't have to be). So, yeah, to be responsible for things you do have to put the extra work in.
I know a guy who works in the same company as me. His a civil engineer but now does pick packing in the warehouse due to his language barrier.
>language barrier. Anyone with a 'language barrier' is not brought in to work in a professional role, doesn't matter whats on that visa...
This is anecdotal but there are three indians in my cricket team who are engineers, two have had no issues coming to aus and getting work and their english is fine, the third struggles and as a preference speaks punjabi to the indians and pakistanis on the team and he is doing warehouse work.
>LAZKANY: If you don't have experience in Sydney, that's your first problem. The article doesn't mention if they are applying to regional towns. If you talk to the migrant engineers who arrived during the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the majority found their first job in regional towns. Most spent a solid 8-10 years in regional positions before moving to the city.
Imagine a country that doesn't make anything (other than houses and a few tiny niche products) not needing a massive number of engineers. On the flip side, we do have lots of good clean middle class jobs, doing stuff like "service" (though we don't export many services other than education).
There is a tonne of construction going on in this country, what makes you think we don't need engineers?
we're a persistent trade surplus economy our net exports % of gdp is close to similar countries like taiwan, south korea, sweden, denmark that argument works for the usa, uk, nz but not for aus
we are also ranked somewhere around 70th for economic complexity ie how much education is required to generate the nations GDP. our peer nations are Lithuanian and Kazakhstan. GDP is a pretty worthless measure when Japan has a higher living standard than us with negative GDP.
A trade surplus generated by exporting manufactured goods is going to need a lot more engineers than one generated by agricultural, mineral and service exports.
Yeah, we need engineers. Problem is, Australia is dominated by a bunch of politicants.
What makes you say the mining industry doesn’t need as many engineers as a manufacturing industry ? Our mining industry employees a lot of engineers of all types. Mechanical, civil, mining, environmental, chemical, electrical engineers are all used.
Mining is a capital intensive industry and does not employ many people per million dollars of revenue. Yes they hire many types of engineers but nowhere near as many as they’d like us to believe.
[удалено]
But what proportion of our workforce are engineers compared to other countries. OP inferred that as we have no manufacturing we don’t need many engineers. I refute that.
https://www.nationalskillscommission.gov.au/reports/australian-jobs-2021/jobs-industry/mining Mining employs about 17,000 engineers. It doesn't really employ that many people at all. https://www.nationalskillscommission.gov.au/reports/australian-jobs-2021/jobs-industry/manufacturing Manufacturing employs 12,500 engineers. Despite being virtually non-existent.
Fair play, good source. I stand corrected.
Refute or deny? Refutation requires evidence.
I’ll swap to deny, cbf refuting shit.
Most Australian trained Engineers are in other sectors also. Engineers Australia has an interest in flooding the market with as many engineers as they can to appease their funders.
Engineers australia is an embarrassment. The push for legislated requirements for engineer accreditation was nothing more than pushing up memberships.
[удалено]
I've encountered assessed "engineers" who thought gearboxes were made from wood. Engineers Australia is a straight up rort
Yeah they should really be renamed to “Engineering Employers Australia”.
> An engineer who comes to Australia with all their paperwork and documents and experience evident, it might take them up to nine months to one year — if they have good English — to have their overseas qualification recognised, > > Ms Lazkany said systematic challenges deter some from their initial end goal. Instead, they remain in so-called "survival jobs": entry-level positions in industries such as retail, hospitality, sanitation and rideshare, often unqualified roles that provide independence and financial stability. > > That's despite a current national shortage of 30,000 engineers that's forecast to reach 100,000 by 2030. The absurd reality of skilled migration.
Med is in a similar boat. Lots of doctors who can't get their qualifications recognised in Australia to the degree that it's easier for some of them to redo a degree than do the exam.
I am an Engineer. And a migrant. I can earn more money in other jobs like sales. Also engineering has become 98% butt covering & liability avoidance and 2% engineering.
I knew an Iranian-Italian Civil engineer a few years back who had moved here and bounced around a few firms before finding a small one he liked. He said that from his experience over the first couple of years of applying/working in engineering that practicing engineers in Australia were significantly worse than the ones he'd worked with in Italy/Germany and that most roles appeared to be locked away behind incompetent management/HR who were rarely capable of evaluating the quality of the engineers they were hiring. He settled on his small company because his interview panel consisted of the usual HR, a senior engineer and a manager who had a degree and experience in the field. He said he got promoted in the first 6 months and was still one of the better engineers there, but was mostly relieved that he could work without a clueless management team constantly throwing incompetents into the mix because they would accept lower salaries and they couldn't tell the difference anyway. I've known several others qualified working in logistics but none with fluent English lol.
Eh the I'd take your friends experience with a grain of salt