Australia needs 100,000 more engineers. The solution is already here.

There are senior civil and structural engineers in Sydney right now with five to ten years of experience, valid working rights, completed Engineers Australia skills assessments and every piece of paperwork in order. They came from the UK, South Africa, India, Singapore and the Middle East. Some of them designed work that is larger and more technically complex than what they are applying for in NSW.

Most of them are not getting interviews. The stated reason is that they do not have Australian experience.

This is one of the more expensive habits in the NSW engineering market, and it is getting harder to justify as the shortage tightens.

The scale of the problem

Engineers Australia estimates Australia will be short roughly 100,000 engineers by 2030. The National Skills Commission classifies the shortage as structural rather than cyclical, which means it is not easing, it is compounding. Australia does not produce enough engineering graduates domestically to close the gap. Skilled migration is part of the government's official answer to the shortage.

Firms are filtering it out at the application stage.

The fill rate for senior technical engineering roles has dropped to around 54%. Roles are sitting open for months. Project timelines are slipping. And the engineers who could fill those roles, the ones who have already relocated, completed their assessments and committed to building a career here, are being screened out before anyone speaks to them.

The logic behind the rule, and why it does not hold at senior level

The case for requiring Australian experience is not unreasonable on its face. Australian codes differ from international standards. AS3600, AS5100 and AS1170 carry specific requirements that do not translate one-to-one from British Standards or Eurocode. Local design conventions, soil conditions and regulatory frameworks have nuances that matter on a live project. Some firms have been burned by hires who could not make that transition.

The problem is applying that logic uniformly across experience levels.

A graduate engineer with two years of experience in another country is a different proposition to a senior structural engineer with eight years of complex high-rise work in London. The graduate is still building foundational technical judgement. The senior engineer has it. The Australian-specific layer, meaning the codes, the conventions, the regulatory context, takes three to six months to learn on the job. It does not take five years, and it does not require that the learning happen before employment.

The technical fundamentals of structural and civil engineering do not change at the border. Loads, materials, connections, foundations: the underlying engineering is the same. What changes are the specific standards and local conventions layered on top. That layer is learnable. Senior engineering judgement is not.

What is actually being left on the table

The pool of senior overseas engineers already in Australia is one of the most underused assets in the current market. These are not candidates who decided to try Australia on a working holiday. They invested in the visa process, the Engineers Australia assessment, the relocation, and in many cases the disruption of moving families and careers across hemispheres. They are committed. They are experienced. And they are being treated as if they were graduates asking for their first break.

From my desk, the engineers in this pool who do get interviews are converting at a high rate. Firms that have taken a chance on a senior overseas hire with no local experience are, in the majority of cases, not reporting problems. The three-to-six-month adjustment to local codes and conventions is real but manageable. What comes with it is eight or ten or twelve years of engineering experience that the local market simply cannot supply in the volumes required.

What I expect to happen

The firms that adjust their criteria first will get the strongest candidates from this pool. The engineers who have been in Australia for six to twelve months, building local networks and absorbing the market, will not be available indefinitely. They are finding their way in through contract roles, through smaller firms willing to look past the local experience requirement, and through referrals. The open market window on the best of this cohort is not unlimited.

The firms that hold the line on Australian experience will keep competing for the same local pool everyone else is chasing, a pool that is not growing fast enough to meet demand. That is a defensible position with a clear and foreseeable cost.

The shortage is structural. The pipeline is real. The engineers are already here. The question is whether the hiring criteria firms wrote for a different market are still the right ones for this one.

The companion piece on interviewing well covers what senior engineers, local and overseas, should be doing to convert the interviews they do get. For firms hiring, the hire talent conversation is the fastest way to talk through how to assess overseas candidates without dropping the bar.

If you are hiring civil or structural engineers in NSW and want to talk through how to assess overseas candidates effectively, or if you are an internationally trained engineer looking for a firm willing to look at your experience properly, reach out.

— George