He said there was a brisk movement of engineers to wherever the most interesting or rewarding work was being done, facilitated in large part by the fact that qualifications were internationally recognized.

“The majority of successful companies in Australia – and internationally – sell both products and services around the world. Similarly, overseas companies are major employers here in Australia,” Hoffman said.

“And the demand for these skills is rising fast.

“Consequently, just about every country is experiencing a shortage of engineering skills of some form or another. And we’ve seen this most acutely in Australia. And it’s not a blip: it’s a long term problem.”

Hoffman said even when demand seemed flat, it only took a small increase in economic growth to create desperate shortages. 

“Wealthy developed countries like Australia have addressed this in two ways – education and immigration: train more engineers, or import them from other education systems,” he said.

“In Australia, we’ve seen dramatic increases in education: 25 years ago, there were 43,600 students studying engineering at local universities, of whom 12% were female and 9% were international students.

“By 2015, the engineering student population had grown 230% to 100,000; of whom 17% were female and 36% were international students.”

At UNSW, there are 14,000 engineering students, and its graduates account for nearly 15% of all engineers coming out of Australian universities. 

“Anecdotally, we estimate that 30% of graduates move overseas within a year of graduation – half international students, half local,” Hoffman said.

Universities in the Sydney basin educated 32,000 – more than one third – of Australia’s engineers in 2014.

“Our major universities are large by UK standards, where the largest engineering programs have in the order of 5000 students, but we are small by Asian standards, and that’s where the future competition lies,” Hoffman said.

“This may sound impressive, but it’s not enough. Over the past decade, Australian graduates have represented less than half the total number of engineering jobs that need to be filled annually … some 15,000 to 18,000 a year.

“Skilled immigration provides much to Australia, but I believe that depending upon it for half our engineering workforce is not ideal.

“Some 36% of students in our university engineering programs are international. This may seem large, but it’s less than the fraction entering the workforce through immigration who were educated elsewhere.”