Posted on 03/04/2008 11:51:20 AM PST by central_va
Aerospace and Defense Sector Braces for Potential Brain Drain As Cold War Workers Retire
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The aerospace and defense sector is bracing for a potential brain drain over the next decade as a generation of Cold War scientists and engineers hits retirement age and not enough qualified young Americans seek to take their place. ADVERTISEMENT
The problem -- almost 60 percent of U.S. aerospace workers in 2007 were 45 or older -- could affect national security and even close the door on commercial products that start out as military technology, industry officials said.
While U.S. universities are awarding two-and-a-half times more engineering, math and computer science degrees than they did 40 years ago, defense companies must compete with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Verizon for the best and the brightest.
"It's about choices," said Rich Hartnett, director of global staffing at Boeing Co. "There are so many more options today with a proliferation in the kinds of degrees and career paths that people can follow."
Industry leaders are doing their best to emphasize the allure, and growing importance, of jobs linked to national defense.
Aerospace Industries Association Chief Executive Marion Blakey said the U.S. could be facing another "wake-up call," similar to the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, the world's first satellite. China's success in shooting down one of its own satellites last year, as well as the upcoming retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet, signal that the country cannot afford to take its technological and military superiority for granted, said Blakey, the former head of the Federal Aviation Administration.
In addition to fierce competition for a limited pool of math and science experts from all corners of corporate America, contractors working on classified government programs are hamstrung by another factor: restrictions on hiring foreigners or off-shoring work to other countries.
"The ability to attract and retain individuals with technical skills is a lifeblood issue for us," said Ian Ziskin, corporate vice president and chief human resources and administrative officer for Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp.
Ziskin estimates that roughly half of Northrop Grumman's 122,000 workers will be eligible to retire in the next five to 10 years. The trend is the same at Lockheed Martin Corp., of Bethesda, Md., which could lose up to half of its work force of 140,000 to retirement over the next decade. At Chicago-based Boeing, about 15 percent of the company's engineers are 55 or older and eligible to retire now.
The launch of Sputnik set off panic that the U.S. was falling behind in the space race. And it swelled the ranks of aerospace and defense workers as a wave of Americans answered a call to help the U.S. regain military superiority and began careers building rocket ships and missiles.
Fifty years later, industry executives fear there won't be enough new defense sector workers to replace those employees as they retire.
In 2005, U.S. universities awarded 196,797 undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, math and computer science, according to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. That's up sharply from 77,790 degrees in 1966. But competition for those graduates is more intense than ever.
Defense companies today are competing with Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- not to mention Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and the Navy -- for computer science majors, according to Kimberly Ware, associate director for employer relations at Virginia Tech. They are vying with General Electric Co., Westinghouse Electric Corp. and the big auto makers for electrical and mechanical engineering graduates, she said.
For its part, Boeing is up against telecom giants such as Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. as it grows its satellite business. It even competes with video game makers such as Electronic Arts Inc. for 3D graphic designers and software programmers.
At the same time, defense executives acknowledge, the sector does not exert the same patriot pull as it once did since young people today have never known a time when the U.S. was not a leader in space exploration or the world's sole superpower.
The industry confronts another challenge too. Unlike technology companies, defense companies generally have to hire American citizens since they need employees who can obtain security clearance. This eliminates foreign graduates of American universities and foreign employees in the U.S. on H-1B visas.
"The talent is going to have to be homegrown," said Blakey of the aerospace association.
Similarly, defense contractors cannot outsource to countries with more technical workers, such as India or China.
Against this backdrop, defense companies are reaching out to American students in the earliest grades.
Lockheed Martin is sending employees into elementary schools to tutor students in math and science and is recruiting high school students to shadow Lockheed workers on the job. The company's engineers coach robotics teams, conduct rocket propulsion experiments for students and participate in mentoring programs.
Northrop Grumman has established a program called Weightless Flights of Discovery, which allows middle school teachers to experience temporary weightlessness on "zero-gravity" airplane flights that mimic how astronauts train for space travel.
Defense contractors are also trying to market themselves to job candidates with flexible schedules, tuition reimbursement programs and plenty of opportunities for advancement. Above all, noted Linda Olin-Weiss, director of staffing services at Lockheed Martin, the defense industry offers "challenging work on programs of national importance."
The implications of falling behind extend beyond national security since military technology often has civilian uses, too. The origins of GPS satellites and the Internet are linked to military applications.
But with the U.S. space program planning a return to the moon and a manned mission to Mars, Blakey believes there is at least one event on the horizon that could lure a new generation of Americans into the aerospace and defense industry.
"The question is: how do you encourage young kids to think of themselves as potential scientists and engineers," Blakey said. "We hope that a return to the moon and Mars will help inspire them."
There are enough American brains. They used to work in engineering and technology. You’ll find them. They’re at the unemployment center.
Officers generally have a 4 year degree before starting military service. It is also common for them to require a clearance in the process of that service. Do you have a BA or BS in a field relevant to the job opening? Do you have a record of accomplishments relevant to the job opening? If you have the necessary experience, the contractor will start the clearance process and put you on non-cleared tasks until the clearance reaches "interim" status. When it goes "final", you will get assignments that actually deal with the classified material.
If you don't have at least a BA or BS in a relevant field, you're going to have a very hard time competing with a field of persons with degrees. In the 90s there was such a demand for anyone who could perform web oriented development that a degree didn't matter. That level of work has been mostly sent offshore. I conducted interviews on behalf of a customer in Denver in March 2000. Over 400 applicants were reviewed. Nearly all had a 4 year degree. Most had pretty "fluffy" resumes. Only 7 were found worthy of hire. One of those bilged the 2nd day. He was a lot better at interviewing than actually doing the work.
Perhaps you should take some of those offers to build a resume and references. Your resume needs to show a track record of success on work relevant to the prospective employer.
Granted, we’ll continue to run the AFS partitions and micro-ATX workstations for a while, until the new CPU prices come down and a better solution is found for the power consumption in NASs (drive arrays). But the news on 1 - 10 watt processors is good. One of those will knock another 100 watts or so out of the cold server closet.
Most of the people on my project (under 50) have degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering. A select few have degrees in physics and mathematics. Many of the over 30 people have master's and PhD degrees in mathematics or physics. There are ZERO persons on the project without a 4 year degree.
I have yet to see a "wet behind the ears" graduate that doesn't have a lot to learn about working properly within a software development team. It's not an unexpected condition. Persons with 4 year degrees tend to ramp up very quickly.
It's perfectly possible to complete a BA or BS degree without becoming "indoctrinated". That's part of the sifting process. If you can't get through it, you're not going to get to first base in seeking employment. My dad served as an XO of a ship or naval base over much of my lifetime. He grilled me so severely that I've never encountered anyone tougher in the real business world. It's part of the character building process.
Persevere. Endure. Get the 4 year degree in hand so that you're not tossed off the list of candidates in the first 30 seconds. My son returned from his service in Kuwait and Iraq (USMC) and earned his BS in Business Administration from University of Phoenix. He built a 60 person real estate business with that background. Still, he realized that a 4 year degree is barely enough to be competitive in his field. A MBA is what he will need to have any hope of reasonable upward mobility.
My most recent x86_64 motherboard has lots of passive heat sinks and tubing. It looks like a roller coaster. A reduced power CPU would be welcome...especially for embedded work where power and cooling are an issue.
Thinking Small: New Intel Architecture Champions Sub 1 Watt x86
http://www.dailytech.com/Thinking+Small+New+Intel+Architecture+Champions+Sub+1+Watt+x86/article10930.htm
...the “Atom” chip. And I’m sure that AMD will produce something competitive before long. We’ll also see fans disappearing from more of the fancy video cards (multi-CPU boards for direct rendering) pretty soon.
The young folks and I will probably run some tests to see how much power cheap SATA drives really use over a day. I’m guessing that they don’t use much when configured to land between use periods.
There is also a GPS in the box with the PC104 to set time and provide lat/lon information to track the car. I have other PIC controllers measuring bearing temperatures and accelerometers to record longitudinal, lateral and vertical motions. I calculate moving averages for temperature and vibration. That is also sent to the back end server.
The high bandwidth vibration signatures are handled with a Diamond Systems DMM32 to read 100,000 samples per second from the vertical accelerometers on left and right wheels on each axle. About 20 seconds of sample is taken, then subjected to a multi step Fourier analysis. The target frequencies are characteristic of the cone, cup, cage and rollers in the bearing. I pick off the fundamental plus 5 harmonics. That data reduction is sent to the server as well. The end product of the analysis is an early forecast of the kinds of defects occurring in the bearings. The approach can identify 55 specific kinds of defects.
An earlier design used 16 channels of the Diamond DMM32 to measure the bearing temperatures. That is terribly wasteful of the device that retails for $750. I'm accomplishing the same thing with a couple of $10 PIC18F6680 devices and transmitting the results to the PC104 over a CAN bus instead of very expensive low loss analog wiring. The next gen for the high bandwidth analysis will use a stereo audio A to D device driving a dedicated DSP chip to do the bearing analysis. That will replace the $750 card with less than $50 in electronics and do the same job.
How many of these students are actually American?
Thank you. That is really neat! I’ve only played with little controllers in routers so far...very common. But we’ve spent a little time at picking through boards for lower-energy weather monitoring and environmental controls and will eventually choose one to get started with.
It appears that you might also have some background in manufacturing engineering or machining. I hope to find the time and space to show the young folks here a hands-on thing or two (history of theory, indexing gears, turning, grinding, finishes, metallurgy and the like).
A nice entry level PIC package would be a PICDEM2Plus board with the ICD2 programmer. The MPLAB IDE and assembler is offered for free. A student version of the C18 C compiler is also available for free on the website. For about $200 you have a great development platform to get your feet wet. You'll need a Windows PC to host the MPLAB IDE and USB based ICD2 programmer.
If you grab the recommended kit and a copy of "An Embedded Systems Primer" by David Simon, you'll have everything you need to learn from the ground up. Simon focuses on using the PIC18F452 in his book. His attention to detail is superb.
Thank you for the information about controllers. Searches for recommendations specifications are tougher than they were a few years ago with sales pitches dominating the search engines.
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