In this article, United States Senator Edward Kaufman talks about how America can once again become a world leader through a rededicated effort of government to invest in the recruitment and training of engineers. He believes that investing more money on training engineers will help the U.S. develop innovative solutions to many economic and public policy problems we currently face. Senator Kaufman is currently the only U.S. Senator that holds an engineering degree; he recalls the days of Sputnik. After Russia launched Sputnik 1, the American leaders urged the nation to catch up and improve our commitment to science. Unfortunately, in the recent years America’s college students have decided to use their math skills on Wall Street instead of the engineering field. In 1986, engineering and engineering technology students earned close to 10% of U.S. bachelor’s degrees. Today that percentage is only about 5% and that includes bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees.

It would appear that jobs in the reliability industry and predictive maintenance field would fall into the category of being crucial to the development of innovative solutions for maintaining equipment. If the US Government were to invest more resources in the recruitment and development of engineers, there would be more highly qualified reliability engineers and predictive maintenance technicians available in the job market. This would give businesses that require the upkeep and maintenance of their machinery to decrease downtime and ultimately, increase their ROI. Like other engineers, reliability engineers and predictive maintenance professionals are so important to the turnaround of U.S. economy.

Sites like NextUp Careers are helping engineers find their place in the job market. By devoting the site to finding jobs reliability engineers and predictive maintenance professionals, maybe we are one step closer to re-establishing the engineering practices that we use to be so important.