Engineering Profession Statistics

One of the topics that interested me when I first started writing this blog over two years ago was the vitality of the engineering profession in the United States.  There has been much written from within the profession about outsourcing engineering jobs to low labor cost countries, lack of educational focus on science and math for children, and a shortage of the engineers needed to drive prosperity and innovation for the future of the United States.  This is a time of profound change in the engineering profession, and it is probably this change that leads many to look critically at the profession.  I have experienced a lot of that change first hand over the last ten years of my career.  Working with engineers across the U.S. has been common for some time as design teams are spread out geographically.  Working with engineers all around the world is even becoming common now.  The nature of design engineering is changing rapidly as well.  Barriers between different engineering disciplines are disappearing.  Successful engineering projects don't have different engineering departments working on "blocks" of a design in isolation from each other.  There is a strong focus on multi disciplinary design teams with engineers working together on projects.  Having understanding of many disciplines is very important for engineers now, especially more experienced senior level engineers leading projects.

I wanted to investigate the growth of the engineering profession over the 20th century and then continue to track the growth as these changes in the profession unfold over the coming years.  I used data from the United States Census Bureau in the statistical abstracts.  I extracted the number of engineers from the statistical abstracts for every 10th year throughout the 1900's.  I used these numbers with the entire population of the United States in each of these years (also census data), to plot the ratio of engineers to entire population.  The results are shown in the following figure.

There has been a very large growth in the engineering profession in the past century.  This isn't surprising since the past century was also a time of huge growth in technology, knowledge, and standard of living in the United States.  As technology growth continues to accelerate, more and more engineers will be responsible for that acceleration.  The engineering profession will continue to grow, and I don't think there is much that can stop it.  I believe that the growth in technology is the driver, and the number of engineers is an effect of that growth.  I don't see a stoppage of engineering growth because of poor education systems, unmotivated youth, or globalization as a possibility.  The advantage in innovation and growth in engineering belongs to those countries that have systems of governance based on the ideals of freedom, private property rights (including and especially intellectual property), and free enterprise.  Humans will strive to improve their lives until scarcity is eliminated and self realization is the only goal left.  It's hard to imagine how far we will go, and even somewhat frightening to think about.  Any comments?

Anyone wishing for the raw extracted data from the figure can contact me via email and I will send it.