Engineering labor market 2021Full steam ahead back into the skills shortage?
The agonizingly long-lasting coronavirus pandemic has also caused the job market for engineers to freeze in many places, but it has not come to a complete standstill, as a survey of recruiters shows. Will there be a race to catch up?
Harald Wilde, Vice President Human Resources at dSpace, does not expect a return to normality any time soon: "I think that a sustainable economic recovery will only take place in the second half of 2021, when the infection figures will hopefully fall noticeably."
The vacancies to be filled are related to the expected turnover "resulting from the existing or non-existing customer budgets".
Until then, dSpace has placed some vacancies on "on hold", which will be reactivated when orders are received on a sustained basis and the economy recovers.
Of course, this will not change the general need for skilled workers, he clarifies: the shortage of engineers and qualified specialists with technical expertise in the field of AI has not suddenly disappeared due to the coronavirus crisis, "it will continue to haunt us, experienced employees in research and development will have very good career and earning prospects now and definitely in the future".
At the moment, it is more the graduates who are struggling on the job market. Wilde sees it as a particular challenge for companies to shape the digital transformation into an attractive working world of the future for existing and new employees.