American Council of Engineering Companies of Florida (ACEC Florida)

EXPANDING OUR WORKFORCE – AND EVOLVING OUR CULTURE

ACEC is a strong proponent of federal and state spending on public infrastructure, and our efforts are paying off. Over the past two years, our advocacy helped lead to the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) and Science Act.

With all of this infrastructure investment, there is so much work for our industry to look forward to. But, as we know, our industry faces a mounting challenge in finding a qualified workforce to deliver these projects and improvements to our country’s infrastructure.

On April 20, ACEC sent a letter to President Biden advocating the federal government act to assure that there are enough engineers to build the infrastructure funded by the IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS Act. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the engineering workforce was at full employment before the implementation of IIJA, IRA, and the CHIPS and Science Act. The ACEC Research Institute highlighted concerns about capacity in its most recent quarterly engineering business sentiment study when it reported that 49 percent of firms have turned down work specifically due to workforce shortages.

ACEC Florida supports a number of workforce growth initiatives, including expanded STEM education as a long-term solution to growing the next generation of engineers.

Growing engineers for the future will not solve today’s workforce challenges. ACEC also supports increasing the availability of H-1B visas, recapturing unused employment-based green cards, and expanding the F-1 OPT program. This will ensure that in the shortterm more international students attaining STEM degrees at U.S. universities are able to stay in this country and join the U.S. workforce.

ACEC Florida is investing in Florida’s future engineering workforce by joining with the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) and Federal Highway Administration to sponsor Construction Career Days, exposing thousands of high school students to hands-on Learning Labs that focus on various aspects of designing, building and maintaining Florida’s roads and bridges.

As ACEC National President and CEO Linda Bauer Darr recently wrote in her April message:

The world is a seismically different place than it was even a decade ago, with the perfect storm of COVID and civil unrest further shifting that landscape into something almost unrecognizable. The workforce now preparing for commencement at colleges and universities across the country – your prospective employees – speaks a different language than many of us are used to.

Where once a career path was decided by weighing salaries and benefits, this generation looks beyond. Issues like commitment to social justice, work-life balance, climate change and DEI&B all feature prominently in surveys of younger people entering the workforce. Legislation and regulation can set the table for meeting our workforce needs, but ultimately it will be up to all of us to serve a meal that younger workers find palatable. This is not the workforce we once knew, and there are lingering (erroneous) perceptions that our industry is an Old Boy’s Club.

ACEC will continue to work relentlessly for legislation that creates a favorable climate for our industry – but that’s just half the battle. The other half is that our industry must work relentlessly to create a favorable climate for our next generation of engineers.

Our future success depends on it.