I’m afraid it is because the bulk of our profession has chosen to outsource those jobs to Asia. Now we are an outsource company too — we do small to mid sized jobs for OEMs. But, when their product hits big — they all send the work overseas. Consequently, we stay small. But, I can’t supply the workers either. We are constantly scraping the bottom of the barrel, hoping to find a gem who can match our older workers and become the next generation of leads.
Try to find a good circuit board designer that can design without a computer. Almost impossible. I was a design manager and even when I hired senior designers, I would retrain them to our way of doing things. 20 years ago, I had designers making 60K a year. By the time we got done with them they could get a job any place in the country.