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Technology Resourcing have recently concluded a survey regarding the ‘ageing population of the Building Services industry’ and it has thrown up some interesting results. The thought behind this survey was that a couple of months ago I had a conversation with a senior manager of a well known Building Services Consultants and he mentioned that almost 40% of the engineering staff at his company would be reaching retirement age in the next five years. With all the media attention regarding vocational course students decreasing in number and worry within the industry that a career in Building Services engineering was less appealing to younger generations this raised the concern of a major shortage of engineers within the industry in the not too distant future.
Analysing the results has gone some way to placating the worries a little, showing that 55% of the engineers surveyed are twenty years or more away from retirement age and only 4% are to hit this age in the next five years. Therefore the ageing demographic of the industry is not a major worry in the very short term (next five years) however if we look at the overall picture and think about the long term future of the industry it is a bleak outlook. Our survey shows that 45% of the industry are to hit retirement age in the next twenty years or before and combine this with the decreasing number of engineers entering the industry and the effect the recession has had on existing members it does not bode well.
Our evidence during this recession shows that the top tier of engineers has not been as badly affected as the junior and intermediate level, in terms of redundancies, and since the market has begun to return to some sort of normality we’ve noticed a significantly higher number of vacancies for the more senior engineers that are able to lead teams, deal with clients and manage projects. Another factor affecting the Junior/ Intermediate levels is consultancies taking the conscience decision to outsource their detail design and CAD capabilities to vastly cheaper design houses overseas in places like Manilla and India which again has led to redundancies and a reduction in new opportunities for engineers to learn their trade in M&E Design The combination of these factors has unfortunately led to a staggering number of Junior and Intermediate level engineers leaving the industry all together or sitting at home unable to find any suitable Building Services positions, gradually losing the skills gained in their first few years in the industry.
As this survey was conducted on Linked In we do obviously have to take into account the demographic of the users of this social networking site in order for us to evaluate these results properly and the figures here do not make the results any more attractive in the long term. The majority (60%) of users of Linked In are below the age of 45 and therefore this would suggest that the figures we receive for people’s age in relation to the retirement age would be slightly skewed towards that age group. This would suggest that perhaps the figure of 45% relating to engineers retiring in the next twenty years maybe a little bit on the low side and in fact a larger percentage of the industry will be ending their careers in building services in the next twenty years.
On evaluation of these results it is very clear that something needs to be done within the industry (whether by the government, CIBSE or other professional bodies) to encourage younger engineers to join and that they are encouraged to remain within the industry for the whole of their career otherwise we could be facing a major shortage of Senior Engineers in the not too distant future. How likely this is going to be with the impending spending cut fall out and the worrying state of the market at present will remain to be seen.
View the results here…
http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/99887/kkluf
