With design starts beginning for Year 2000 products, firms are scrambling to find the engineers they need in order to get the job done well and in a timely manner. Attempting to seize multiple opportunities only intensifies the problem. There is a huge gap between the wireless market's need for engineering talent and the number of engineers available, says Dan Yoder, vice president of Cadence's Wireless Design Services. The industry is already growing at 40 percent per year. A senior executive at Lucent Technologies told me the company could hire all the available wireless design engineers in the U.S. and still not fill all the slots it needs to fill.
Hard numbers underscore the point.
In recent years, fewer than 20,000 electrical engineering degrees were awarded annually in the US., about 10,000 a year less than in the 1980s. Computer science and EE degrees dropped from a high of 50,000 to under 40,000. While the numbers drop, the need expands. The Department of Commerce estimates that the U.S. alone needs 95,000 new computer scientists, programmers, analysts, and engineers each year through the year 2005. The problem is worse in the wireless specialties, says Yoder.