Engineers are in demand in Wisconsin

Daily Reporter (Milwaukee), Sep 4, 2007 by Paul Snyder

It's not that engineering is a completely unpopular career choice, says Lisa Riedle, it's just that it's rather undefined.

"It's such a generic term," said the associate dean of the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. "Everyone thinks of it differently. Depending on you who you talk to, it could relate to roads, buildings, wastewater management, computers, so on and so forth. What we have to do is help people understand what engineering really is."

And the UW system along with the state and other schools throughout Wisconsin are taking the necessary steps to do that.

At the forefront of that effort is Project Lead the Way, a national effort to provide students hands-on project- and problem- based programs, many of which fall into engineering's multiple fields. To date, the program is included in 95 different schools throughout Wisconsin, from K-8 elementary to the high school level.

While Professor John Farrow from the Milwaukee School of Engineering is the Wisconsin program's associate director, it's breeding success for a number of universities around the state.

"It's one of the more interesting stories because it's turning out to be something that's not just a flash in the pan," said Jon Jensen, associate dean of the Marquette University's college of engineering. "We're ranked fourth in the country in terms of student involvement and have more than 8,000 kids involved in the program right now."

Marquette offers an automatic $1,000 scholarship to any student interested in the university that's been a part of the PLTW curriculum.

"It's not a lot, but it's certainly something," Jensen said.

Gaining ground

Beyond that, Marquette also takes part in an educational outreach program that starts with kids as young as six years old, involving them in programs that involve Legos and robotics. It also offers a program for young women that allows its participants to design and build a robot.

"It lets women understand the process and see that they can do this too," Jensen said. "The important thing for engineering is to start scattering the seeds as early as possible."

And while PLTW's current enrollment numbers are robust, both Jensen and UW-Plattville's Riedle said stronger numbers lay ahead.

"We're back in a growth period now," Riedle said. "We've got the tri-state initiative, which offers reduced tuition for particular majors for students coming in from Illinois or Iowa, and a lot of those majors are engineering disciplines."

She added that in the next five to seven years, UW-Platteville alone is aiming to gain 1,000 more engineers.

"We're only at the very tip of what we're trying to accomplish," Jensen said. "Nine, 10 years ago, there was just a general disinterest in the field. What that comes down to could be any number of things, and certainly the globalization of the economy and outsourcing of jobs probably drove some people away.

"Engineering is about innovation though -- coming up with new products and themes, and that message is resurging."

Workers in demand

And if you're worried about getting work, Mark Huber, CEO of Madison-based engineering firm BT Squared Inc said you needn't be.

"There's still a lot of work out there, particularly in our field," he said. "As far as things like outsourcing go, it's just pretty unlikely here. We're a hands-on company, we need to be there to see things and test them. You can't do that over a Webcam. More than that, we're finding our clients want local workers who are familiar with not only state codes, but city codes. It'd be tough to ship that work to India."

Huber said that he's seen firsthand the ebb of interest in engineering, and that with it, employees have modified their own standards for work.

While it remains to be seen if the resurgence will bring further change, Tim Valley, the dean of enrollment management at MSOE, said the numbers will certainly be there.

"The amount of effort it takes to become an engineer is daunting," he said. "It's not just an awareness issue, but a character issue. We do let students know that being an engineer is certainly wearing a badge of courage, but we're starting to see that ethic return in a big way.

"The thing is that at its core, engineering is a linear, logical process to solving problems. There will always, always be a need for that."