Speaking at the fourth annual Bulk Materials Handling conference in Brisbane on Wednesday, Sweeting Consulting principal David Sweeting said the skills problem was widespread and warned Australia would “struggle to emigrate its way out of the problem”

“It was around 1999 that Engineers Australia started to recognise that a skills shortage was coming and we all of course know that skills shortage has arrived,” he said.

“At the moment, for example, we’re stealing New Zealand engineers and New Zealand are stealing South African engineers. As yet, we haven’t found Europe or the US stealing our engineers but that sort of feeding frenzy is undoubtedly going to take place sometime in the future.”

Sweeting said technical experience was being lost to management and more engineers were retiring each year than were graduating. He also warned other industries were recognising the specific skills of engineers and poaching them.

“It’s turning out to be even worse because banks, lawyers and accountants realise engineers have skills, particularly analytical skills which they can’t find anywhere else,” he said.

“So we’re losing engineers now not only to overseas, not only to management, but we’re losing them to other industries in Australia that realise they’ve got value.”

Sweeting also took aim at education and the dumbing down of technical maths streams and directionless university courses as a contributing factor to the shortage. However, he predicted the biggest hole would appear on the technical side.

“You’re going to find you’ve got enough management blokes around … but the developing hole is the number of engineers that remain as technicians, and you’re going to have to encourage this people to stay there,” he said.

“That means they have to have a career path similar to the management path and have the same management rewards.

“What’s going to happen to us is eventually our economy is going to slide simply because we won’t have the skills which we need to maintain it.”