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Professional Pipeline Workshop A joint survey conducted by the Water Environment Federation (WEF) and the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and presented at the 2003 AWWA/WEF Joint Management Conference determined that within the next 10 years almost 80% of the professional workforce associated with public water and wastewater utilities (somewhat vaguely defined) will be eligible to retire. In the March 21, 2005 issue of Fortune magazine, an article entitled "Hot Careers for the Next 10 Years" suggested that there will be a 54.3% increase in the number of environmental engineering jobs over the next 10 years, the highest of all the listed professions and well above that predicted for careers such as network systems and datacom analysts, software engineers, and biomedical engineers. Other publications have indicated similar trends. National and regional conferences of trade organizations that incorporate the Environment Engineering field have also targeted this issue recently with numerous workshops and technical sessions dedicated to the changing workforce, succession planning/management, retirement of the baby boom generation, etc. It is becoming clear that the retirement of the baby boom generation will have a dramatic impact on the environmental engineering profession, perhaps more so than other engineering fields. This is likely due to the significant recruitment of baby boomers into the environmental engineering field in the 1970's at the time when major federal environmental laws and regulations were promulgated. With the commonly reported saturation of the Environmental Engineering field in the 1980's and 1990's and the emergence of the information technology boom, it seems that the baby boom generation represented the backbone of the professional environmental engineering workforce during this time, with proportionally much less recruitment into the field as compared to other engineering disciplines. Although some of these predictions for the Environmental Engineering profession are quite speculative, the trend is apparent - there will be a significant demand for technically qualified Environmental Engineers over the next 10 to 20 years. This demand will likely far outpace the pipeline of students being trained as Environmental Engineers. Mid- and entry-level environmental engineers with a sound technical base are already in short supply, and what seems to be a considerable increase in starting salaries offered by engineering consulting firms in the last two to three years is apparent. There is currently a tremendous demand for entry-level environmental engineers, although most are actively seeking employees that have obtained a Masters degree in this field. The environmental engineering field seems to be moving to a point where a Masters degree is required to be proficient in the workforce, and the Ph.D. is the defining degree for technical work. Schedule to come. |
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