Spain will need to incorporate at least 200,000 engineers in the next ten years to meet the needs of companies, both in the industrial sector and in services, where this profession is increasingly present in the field of consulting.
This is one of the main conclusions of the first study carried out by the Spanish Engineering Observatory, an organization that has just been born as a result of an unprecedented initiative promoted by the Caixa d'Enginyers Foundation, the Ministry of Industry, several polytechnic universities and benchmark business entities in the country.
As Josep Oriol Sala, president of the observatory and honorary president of Caixa d'Enginyers, tells this newspaper, the study will be presented in the Congress of Deputies next November and has been prepared based on a survey of more than 500 companies installed in Spain, both local and foreign.
“After preparing the study, we estimate that at least 200,000 professionals will be needed in the next ten years. It is a minimum estimate, because we must take into account the factor of the dispersion of professionals to other sectors and the fact that companies are going to demand new profiles of engineers as the economy advances. The profession is increasingly transversal and the figure of the classical engineer is losing prominence”, reasons Sala, who admits that Spain does not start from a bad base. In fact, according to the study, Spain currently has some 750,000 engineers. “It is not a low figure when compared internationally. The engineer ratio for every 1,000 inhabitants is 15.7 in Spain, while in France it is 14.4, in Italy 11 and in Germany 20.4”.
Faced with the need to train 200,000 engineers in the next decade, the Engineering Observatory considers that the Spanish university fabric is ready. It has 47 academic centers of different kinds, among which the polytechnic universities of Catalonia, Madrid, Valencia and Cartagena stand out. However, Sala considers it necessary to increase places given the growing role of the profession. "The engineer is key to the future of the country and the recovery of the industrial GDP, which has fallen from 19% to 14.7% in the last five years." In this sense, the observatory points out that the presence of engineers in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is key in the reconversion of the country's economy. "They allow innovation in a flexible, agile and cheap way," he maintains. In fact, three companies that have reached a valuation of 1,000 million and have become a unicorn in Barcelona –Wallbox, Factorial and Glovo– have been founded by engineers trained at the UPC.
In the commitment not to waste talent on other sectors, the observatory considers incorporating women into the profession to be key. They currently have a minority role, they are barely 20% of the total. It is a stagnant figure over time, regrets Sala, and its scarce presence at the international level is also worrying. In Germany, women engineers are barely 17%, in France 22% and in Italy 18%, to give a few examples. "We think that we must address the problem from the base, act in schools showing references and change the culture of professions linked to gender roles," she indicates.
In addition, the study warns of the need to improve the skills of engineers. Despite the fact that Spanish training has international prestige, the organization considers that training is not fully adapted to the needs demanded by the market. In fact, another of the main conclusions of the study is that 25% of companies show difficulties in finding qualified engineers for the jobs they demand. This means that some vacancies remain unfilled or that companies are forced to hire professionals with a different qualification, which causes an increase in the costs of training workers in the company. For this reason, Sala calls for promoting academic training with new degrees linked to new technologies and trends, such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the energy transition.
As for the working conditions of this group, the high market demand causes conflict to be reduced and wages to be higher than the Spanish average. As the graph prepared based on a 2022 Randstad study shows, salaries can reach 55,000 euros in various positions, more than double the country average.
However, Alejandro Rovira, sectoral head of engineering for the CC.OO. de Catalunya, warns that the sector's collective agreement has not been updated for two years due to the stagnation of negotiations with the employers' association Tecniberia, from the consulting world. Likewise, Rovira warns that the profession has become more precarious in recent years. Although it does not have data, the union assures that subcontracting is becoming more frequent, especially with engineering in low-cost Asian countries, and that engineers who enter the labor market for the first time must face overtime work.
