Any suggestions, freepers?
Transmission Planning engineers are in very high demand. Those are the people who do studies for the expansion of the high voltage power grid. Investment on the grid has virtually stopped in the last ten years and thousands of miles of transmission lines will have to be built. Transmission planners will be in high demand for at least 10-15 years. The following sites are a good indication of current demand in the electric power fields:
http://www.energyjobsearch.com/custom/x2list.asp?keywords=electrical%20engineer
http://www.merchantpowerplant.com/custom/x2list.asp?keywords=power%20transmission
The demand is highly cyclical.
I came out of school in '91 with layoffs rampant at the local companies (Honeywell, Unisys, Control Data). The market was flooded with experienced engineers. Who wanted to hire the entry level guy fresh out of school? Worked as a tech for a year before landing a job at a small company as a manufacturing engineer.
As with anything else, a career as an EE can take unsuspected turns. I ended up in a good niche as it turns out. A Manufacturing Engineer for a medical device company. Pretty much immune to recession. (people get sick in good times and bad)
Let him study something for fun and knowledge for its own sake like philosophy or history of art. And let him be careful to shop for the lowest price so he does not acculumate too much debt.
Or if he wants career let him study law, medicine or go into politics. Military career as a officer also has future.
If he insists on high tech - let him study Chinese or Hindi.
You need to define "good job potential" and "high demand", preferably in terms of income for a geographic location, and number of weeks to replace a job.
There are an awful lot of people out there currently unemployed who think $80K a year in Central Texas is just dandy. To give you a reference point, I just started my own consulting company. I will book about six months of work this year; the rest of the time I will be deliberately taking time off to work on sales, marketing, and infrastructure for the company. Even at that reduced utilization rate, I am on track to book six figures of income this year in the Central Texas area.
Finding contracts that see me flying each week to the client site for $80 per hour (or more) plus expenses, which works out to about a $120,000 per year full time job including basic benefits (catastrophic medical insurance, long term disability, and a SEP-IRA), takes about 2-5 weeks. Drop that to $50 per hour plus expenses, translating into about the $80K full time job, takes about 1-3 weeks. Drop even further to $30 per hour plus expenses, which roughly translates into a $50,000 full time job, and I can almost pick up the phone and get a contract.
Already about 80-90% of unemployed folks out there who would be qualified to do the same work that I perform will disqualify themselves at this point simply because weekly travel is not an option for their personal choices. I know this because I've tried to recruit new employees.
To even make it into the qualifying group however, was relatively easy on the technical front. I know plenty of people who will run rings around me in programming, IQ, and virtually any other aptitude test you care to consider. In other words, my intelligence is above average, but not by terribly much. It did however, take about 6 years of weekly commuting working for other consulting companies, and initially I couldn't even go home except for once every two weeks. Add in constant honing of soft skills, as well as continual retraining. I was also willing to work on the "plumbing" of IT, stuff that is tedious, involved mind-numbing detail, plenty of politics, and just about as unglamorous as it gets in the software world. It is very close to systems administrator's work (and in fact some of it is systems administration), but including yet another abstracted level. The best description I've heard of my kind of work is "ERP for IT".
The reason this kind of work still exists, and still pays relatively well, is because it concentrates upon tangible benefits to the bottom line of the business. That is why work on software accounting systems for example, still holds up fairly well. But for kids who are still in the "I want to write the Next Great American Video Game" phase (been there, done that), this is about as boring a future as imaginable for them.
By all means encourage your children to pursue the foundation necessary for a technical career. The rigorous critical thinking skills that secure a successful school track record in math, science and literature (half or more of my time is spent communicating technical concepts in business terms, and my years spent appreciating literature handsomely paid off) will serve them well in whatever they decide to pursue, technical or not. However, the reality of the software industry is that most programmers are employed for in-house work by businesses, and a lot of that is getting outsourced or obsoleted by ever-capable off the shelf software. Only a few truly gifted and exceptional programmers break into the game houses, and the competition is intense because it is so glamorous. That pretty much leaves only business software for areas of growth: any software that helps businesses save or make money, and most of this stuff is pretty prosaic for kids just getting into programming, unless you are talking about building trading models for hedge funds or similar stuff, which can get pretty hot and heavy with applied CS theory.
I think future success in the software industry boils down to understanding basic free market forces, just like in almost any business. If your children don't mind finding a market need and fulfilling it, and deriving their satisifaction from internal motivations that are not heavily dependent upon the form of how they serve the market, then they won't mind retraining, staying nimble, and enjoying the ride for its lessons even when it gets rough. From my limited perspective, it appears that surviving the future means rewriting the old rules of what it means to have a job, such that many individuals return to a more freelance style business culture that would be more familiar to our ancestors, except now we have to support the twin leviathan costs of government run amuck and involuntary social welfare. I'm not passing judgement on this development as I see it; I'm just trying to make a buck just like the next guy. Holding down a specialized job in a single career is likely to remain an ever-vanishing prospect for increasing numbers of people.
By the way, if there are other Freepers who are interested in doing the kind of work I described, I'd be happy to fill them in on the details. Breaking into my part of the industry at the entry level is pretty hard right now, but still possible for very motivated folks.
Btw, I find it absolutely amazing that 5-6% unemployment is anything to worry about. When I was in college ('78-'83) we were taught that 5-5.5% unemployment was NORMAL. Wow, how things have changed...or have they?