Why 75% of Engineers Will NEVER Work As Engineers!!

75 of engineering graduates end up ditching engineering right after graduation what's up everyone it's oliver today i'm going to be talking about why so many engineering graduates don't end up working in engineering if you've ever been on the dark web of engineering you've probably seen a statistic just like this one many times before but why is it that so many engineers don't end up working in their field of study well there are a few common explanations for this one of the common ones you might hear from students is that they can't find a job in

their field but if you were to go to the employers and ask them if they have job openings they would often say that they have a hard time filling these spaces so there is clearly a disconnect between the way that engineers are looking for jobs and the way that employers are hiring for jobs however i'm sure you can figure out that this tiny discrepancy isn't enough to cover a gap of 75 so the next logical step would be to say are we graduating too many engineers and the quick answer to this is no but also

yes according to this page from newyorkfed.gov engineers only see an unemployment rate from two to four percent so they are finding jobs however if you look in the second column you'll see that 20 to 30 percent of engineers are underemployed being underemployed means that you're working a job that does not require a bachelor's degree at all however this isn't just an engineering problem if you look across the united states and canada there are tons of people that are underemployed with a recent statistic pegging it at about 40 percent of people with bachelor's degrees okay so

that's a pretty crazy number i'm gonna come back to it in a minute but first let me tell you about my sponsor huh just kidding i don't have a sponsor but if you're interested and you want to sponsor me shoot me an email oliverfootbusiness gmail.com now the fact that 20 to 30 of engineers are underemployed is pretty bad but that's not the end of the problems as i said at the beginning 75 of engineers are not employed in engineering leaving 25 who are actually employed in engineering this means that 50 of engineers who are employed

are working decent jobs but not engineering now for them this might not be such a bad thing because maybe they wanted to work in a different field or they found a job that really interests them this raises a problem because people with degrees other than engineering are starting to get displaced by engineers this is a multi-layered problem and i'm not gonna tell you to not get an engineering degree but i am gonna tell you to think about something other than university that being said if you're dead set on university engineering and any other stem field

are still by far your best shot at actually getting employed within a decent job after you graduate but if you're borderline on engineering and you're not super interested maybe think about doing something like a trade school and then taking a few university courses that interest you you'll avoid debt and you might actually get a shot at getting a job in your field so as a statistic mentioned if you're an engineering student prepare to be disappointed the ontario society of professional engineers did a survey asking fourth year engineering students where they intended to work after graduation

as you can see 92 percent of respondents said that they would probably or definitely be working in engineering but as we already know from looking at the statistics only 25 of these hopeful graduates actually ended up in their field i'm not gonna lie this is honestly making me quite sad and i don't know who's to blame here could it be that universities are not providing engineering students with the skills that employers want to see is it the fact that employers are unwilling to spend money and time to train new graduates is the economy simply not

producing enough engineering jobs or are we just simply printing too many degrees and the rate of job creation can't keep up with it i think that it's a mix of all of these factors but i'm inclined to think that the biggest proponent is that there are too many engineering degrees and when you think about this from a financial standpoint it doesn't really make much sense because an engineering degree even in canada costs you about 100 000 so when you think of this from a national or even a provincial perspective why on earth are we investing

so much in the most expensive degrees that we can when the demand simply isn't there engineering degrees are notoriously the most expensive degrees and we're pumping so many students through these programs for what if you were to tell me there was a 25 chance i would actually end up working in engineering i don't know maybe i would have rethought doing this engineering degree or at the very least i would have spent some more time really thinking about what it was i wanted to do another common topic that i saw come up and something i personally

believe is that a lot of people do an engineering degree for the wrong reasons they might see the nice salary they might be pushed by their families or maybe they just want to have the degree for the prestige whatever it is a lot of students will end up dropping a degree if they're in it for the wrong reasons and on top of that those that do stick it out only have a 25 chance of getting a job in their field and to make things worse you have a 25 chance of making your hundred thousand dollar

investment completely worthless by being underemployed this stuff is honestly insane and it's making me go kind of crazy just talking about it all right look when i first started my degree i had the genuine belief that i would be able to work in engineering no problem i went to university with the goal of becoming an engineer however i'm also super interested in other things like finance creative arts music and all of these things i can only call my hobbies right now but the more and more that i research the more i start to question why

i would put myself through hell for such an uncertain future i guess in some ways you can look at me and call me part of the problem because i'm probably going to be one of those engineers who don't end up working in engineering i battle with myself constantly about whether i should be in engineering and i can't be the only one i'm sorry that this video turned into a mid-degree crisis i'll try and save it for a later one so then this brings me to my next point why on earth are we pushing people into

these degrees if we know that none of them are going to end up working in engineering to try and answer my own questionnaire engineering is a great degree for any job even though engineers do have a 20 to 30 percent underemployment rate this is still the lowest underemployment rate of almost any bachelor's degree all right so i was listening to this and i got really confused because why is underemployment the bar shouldn't it be something this shows that there is a huge imbalance between what we're pushing students to go and get versus what jobs are

actually out there this means that overall engineering is still one of the most highly valued degrees so ironically even though there are so many engineering specializations engineering now has kind of become the general smart person degree if you're good at math and physics the next obvious step is to go and get an engineering degree so i still think that engineering degrees have a lot of merit but i don't think that's the only thing we should be telling smart people to go and do this really is a national crisis across north america and i am going

to recommend you stay away from university if you're going for the wrong reasons i really think that the mindset behind trade schools and more untraditional careers needs to start shifting these are gonna be the careers of the future that provide good jobs and they already provide really good salaries and you get the added side benefit of not having to sit in front of a computer 24 hours a day this video is kind of just a psa for you to think really hard about what it is that you want to do even if you're doing something

right now that you feel like you can't switch out of it's always good to re-evaluate your situation and think about your motives so with that being said thank you so much for watching this video it was kind of short and i'm planning on making a full length video much longer than this one about this topic on my second channel called footsteps so go subscribe there if you enjoyed the video be sure to leave a like and subscribe to this channel i try to post a new video every single week let me know your thoughts down

in the comments down below and i will catch you in the next video [Music] you