Electrical Engineering Careers in USA

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Q. I got a publication from IEEE last week with an article about the US EE job market. From peak EE unemployment of 6-7% a couple of years ago we are back to approx 2% EE unemployment, about the same as in 2000-2001 before the job situation took a dive. The article points out that while that sounds like a good thing, the number of US EEs dropped from 440,000 in 2000-2001 to 340,000 in 1st quarter 2005, a drop of 100,000 EEs (and a large percentage drop). That drop is a combination of new grads coming into the EE job market, EEs retiring, and EEs 'abandoning their careers'. The article attributed most of the change to EEs abandoning their careers. The current trend is decreasing EE unemployment with a decreasing number of EEs.

A. -But just what is an EE? My father received his engineering degree from Cornell in 1926. His interest was in what we would call 'electronics'. He took the Mechanical Engineering route as it gave a broader education. Cornell EE's of that era would design power plants, power distribution systems, and AC/DC machines *STOP* I attempted a BSEE at Cornell in the early 60's. Graduates of that era would be well founded in semiconductor physics and quantum mechanics with a minor in microwaves. After dropping out, I got to *do* Electrical Engineering working for the Veterinary Physiology and Chemistry Departments. I later determined that if I wanted to prepare for a career in what I considered EE (read instrumentation), I should have enrolled in the Physics Dept. of the College of Arts and Sciences. I can think of many humorous experiences of my father and I in being assigned freshly minted EE's, he as an engineer and I as a senior tech. They uniformly had no concept of *application* of their theory knowledge base. [ To be fair, I once got a brand new CS grad. We were converting a database from one format to another. Grad came in one morning and "saw" that I had "completed" the conversion routine. Guess what, I hadn't tested it. Grad ran it against live data. There was a missing comma. Result was "educational" ] -I think its more like their careers abandoned them.

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