The Connecticut Transportation Institute at the University of Connecticut is joining engineering and public works leaders to address workforce shortages through the newly created national Engineering Workforce Consortium.
The mission of the Engineering Workforce Consortium is centered around attracting the next generation of engineering talent, retaining the existing workforce in engineering and public works and advocating for industry growth and sustainability, according to a press release by UConn and the Engineering Workforce Consortium.
“We hope that we can kind of reignite civil engineering as an exciting field, and we can encourage more students to go that route,” Eric Jackson, director of the UConn Connecticut Transportation Institute, said.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the consortium follows a landmark workforce summit convened by the American Council of Engineering Companies, the American Public Works Association and the American Society of Civil Engineers, according to the press release.
The Connecticut Transportation Institute hopes to increase the number of students graduating civil engineering at UConn with a transportation focus.
“Our goal is to try and increase the number of students that are graduating and grow the interest in continuing the physical infrastructure pieces that are critical to transportation, getting goods to and from and being able to provide efficient ways of traveling throughout the U.S.,” Jackson said.
Donna Shea, the executive director of the CT Training and Technical Assistance Center, sits on the engineering workforce consortium, representing UConn and helping develop the program and understand what is needed to attract the next generation of engineers while retaining the existing workforce.
The involvement of UConn in a national workforce consortium plays a large role both at the UConn College of Engineering and within the general state of Connecticut, as a wide range of groups commit to solving national workforce shortage issues.
In addition to its new participation in the Engineering Workforce Consortium, the UConn Connecticut Transportation Institute, located on Depot Campus two miles north of main campus, works to support engineering and public workforce development efforts through programs including an engineering recruiting task force partnership with the Connecticut Department of Transportation.
Jackson explains how the Connecticut DOT told UConn to direct more civil engineering graduates towards the transportation field because of the workforce shortages.
“The Connecticut DOT has kind of had a direct pipeline or direct link to the number of students that we’re now allowing into the engineering program,” Jackson said.
There were 269 civil engineering majors across UConn’s campuses for the 2023-2024 academic year, a decrease from 281 in 2022-2023, according to the UConn Engineering 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 annual reports.
However, there were over 3,664 students enrolled in the college in 2023-2024, an increase from 3,541 during the 2022-2023 academic year.
To encourage more students to become interested in transportation engineering fields, Jackson said Connecticut DOT is looking to set up internship programs, which would provide students with more experience and insight into the field.
“Right now, a new entry level engineer at the Connecticut DOT would start at around $75,000 a year, which is a pretty good starting salary for someone coming right out of right out of college,” Jackson said.
“The workforce shortage has been a long time coming,” the American Society of Civil Engineers, who are collaborating on the workforce consortium, said in an article from May 2023.
Simple demographics can play huge roles in the decline, such as the baby-boom generation retiring and a limited supply of current engineers, most of whom did not earn college degrees in the architecture, engineering or construction fields. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and the growing number of jobs in need of new hires due to increased infrastructure funding further adds to the shortage, according to the article.
To help cure the strong workforce shortage in the Connecticut transportation sector, Jackson said there has been talk about expanding degree programs to meet the needs of the industry, such as a construction management major. While UConn does have a construction engineering and management minor, having an actual major could be more beneficial.
In addition to Jackson’s role as director of the Connecticut Transportation Institute at UConn, he is a research faculty within civil and environmental engineering and sits on the workforce development group with Connecticut DOT, serving as a link between the UConn College of Engineering and the transportation workforce.
As well as engineering development, Connecticut Transportation Institute has other programs that are more technology focused, such as a full-scale driving simulator.
Although located on Depot Campus, Jackson said any students are welcome to see some of the work the institute is doing and get involved. The institute hires students who work in the pavement laboratory, code motor vehicle crashes for the state which end up in the statewide crash data repository or work at the Training and Technical Assistance Center preparing courses and documents.
“If students have an interest in kind of the future of transportation and future technologies that may exist with cars, we’re always happy to give tours or speak to students and seeing how we can work with students as they’re going through the educational process,” Jackson said.