The engineering profession: a statistical overview [2019]

This statistical overview aims to contribute to an understanding of Australia's engineering profession by compiling statistics about engineers in Australia. The statistical overview fills a gap created by the fragmented nature of Australian official statistics as they relate to specific professions and occupational groups. Chapter 2 gives an overview of important structural features of the engineering labour market based on the three population censuses conducted by Engineers Australia in 2006, 2011 and 2016. These statistics cover the 10 years to 2016 and there have been changes since. Chapter 2 looks at time series statistics from the ABS Survey of Education and Work (SEW). This is an entirely different data set to the census and the two cannot be reconciled but the broad changes observed are consistent between them even if the numbers are somewhat different. The advantage of the SEW statistics is that they are available up to 2018.

Chapter 3 considers changes over time including changes in supply and demand for qualified engineers, gender imbalance and changes in core engineering industries. Chapter 4 focuses on the transition to engineering education including transition from school to university engineering courses. Chapter 5 examines the overall situation of university engineering education including data on domestic and overseas students studying engineering. Chapter 6 looks at the supply of engineers from domestic sources and focuses on the experiences of new graduates. Chapter 7 presents information about the supply of engineers from skilled migration. Chapter 8 contains statistics on the distribution of qualified engineers across industry, comparing these changes to other segments of the Australian labour market. There is a more detailed discussion of the shift in employment between core engineering industries and non-core industries briefly raised in Chapter 2. This chapter also reviews the top 20 employing industries for qualified engineers and how this list has changed over the years. Chapter 9 attempts an assessment of likely conditions in the engineering labour market in 2019. The first part of the chapter looks at changes in several economic indicators since the 2016 census. The indicators are gross domestic product, engineering construction and vacancies for engineers. Following a recapitulation of supply and demand factors, changes in the indicators guide an assessment of engineering labour market conditions.

Edited excerpts from publication. Show less