With the federal government committing billions of dollars to infrastructure projects over the next 12 months, engineers will be in high demand, according to Hays Recruitment.
In NSW alone, the federal government is committing more than $9.7 billion to infrastructure projects.
Hays Recruitment said projects in NSW, Victoria and the ACT are generating high levels of temporary and permanent recruitment across a number of roles, particularly when it comes to design engineers, project engineers and drafters.
Hays Engineering senior regional director, Adam Shapley, said senior structural engineers are in extremely high demand in Australia right across the consultancy sector.
"But while this activity is creating permanent and temporary jobs in these areas, candidates are looking for roles offering work-life balance," he said.
“Many engineering professionals have been overworked in recent times. We have candidates coming to us who have been clocking working weeks of up to 78 hours and are now looking for less intense, smaller projects to gain a better work-life balance.
“We are also seeing more candidates prepared to move out of big cities if it means improving their lifestyle.”
Along with the toll of lengthy overtime, candidates are also looking for work-life because they understand that employers cannot offer high salaries.
“Despite the shortage of candidates in many areas, employers are not in a position to pay top end salaries to attract talent because they have to reduce their profit margin when bidding on work in order to win contracts,” Adam said.
"Over the January to March quarter we expect Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD) Consultants to be in increasing demand given the much better conditions for the renewable energy sector.
On the building front, professionals in demand include structural design engineers with Australian building experience, civil and structural engineers (buildings) for urban and land development projects, and civil drafters for sub-division and building-related civil works. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum released a report last week which found that engineering specialists in materials, biochemicals, nanotech and robotics will become critically important by 2020.
The report, titled “The Future of Jobs”, looked at how The Fourth Industrial Revolution would disrupt business models and labour markets over the next five years.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will see the convergence of multiple fields, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology.
This, combined with other socio-economic and demographic changes, will result in the net loss of over five million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies.
According to the report, the rate of change means that at conservative estimates, 7.1 million jobs could be lost through redundancy, automation or disintermediation over the next five years, while 2.1 million new jobs will be created, mostly in specialised areas such as Computer and Mathematical or Architecture and Engineering.
Moreover, the gender gap between men and women in engineering is expected to grow.