Local Companies Add Engineers to Cover Projects, Retirements

By Ron DaParma

Western Pennsylvania is a hotbed of job opportunities in engineering again.

And it’s not just at nuclear power juggernaut Westinghouse Electric Co., which is in the process of hiring as many as 1,000 to 2,000 employees and plans to move to a headquarters under construction in Cranberry.

“There’s an incredible demand,” said Donald C. Shields, co- director of the Swanson Institute for Technical Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh’s John A. Swanson School of Engineering.

Jobs for veteran professionals and hundreds of graduates from Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania State University and other schools are available at such large companies as U.S. Steel, Siemens Power Generation Inc., First Energy Corp., Consol Energy and Eaton Corp., said Shields and other experts.

At the same time, a growing cadre of mid- and smaller-sized engineering companies are adding to the mix — like Sci-Tek Environmental Services Inc. of Penn Hills and Venture Engineering & Construction, headquartered on Washington’s Landing.

Sci-Tek has added six engineers over the last year, increasing its staff to 26, said President Charles Toran.

Venture Engineering & Construction opened for business in December, has ramped up to 15 employees and is hiring two to three people a week. Its goal is to have 100 on board in 12 months, said Dave Moniot, president and CEO. Moniot and two other former employees of S/D Engineers Inc. in the Strip District left to establish their own company after S/D was acquired by Siemens Power Group.

“It’s been somewhat of a ‘perfect storm’ ” for those looking to enter the engineering field, said Shields.

First, billions of dollars are being spent on projects that require engineering expertise, projects in areas such as the steel and other metals industries, power plant and infrastructure construction.

Then, there is the need to replace baby-boomer era engineers who are reaching retirement age.

Pitt’s engineering school has been “in growth mode” since 2003. Its goal is to increase the number of undergraduates enrolled to 2,250 and faculty employed to 137 by 2013, up from the current 1,600 and 97, respectively.

Universities in the region have been graduating more science and engineering graduates, according to the Pittsburgh Technology Council’s 2007 State of the Industry Report.

It found that six Western Pennsylvania universities produced 8,348 graduate students in those areas in 2004, (the latest year covered in the report) some 464 more than in 2003 and the highest total since reporting began in 1991.

“We have about 120 engineers on site in three different departments,” said Mark Manoleras, director of engineering for FirstEnergy Corp.’s Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport, Beaver County.

During the summer, the company usually brings in 16 to 24 university interns on site. In addition, during the school year, about a half-dozen students each semester work on site in cooperative-education programs geared to train and attract potential employees.

“We probably will hire between six and 12 to work in various departments this year,” he said.

Mark Perry was among those convinced by the program. After spending 14 years as a Navy SEAL, the former North Braddock resident, now of Negley, Ohio, entered the co-op program at Pitt, with an idea to pursue electrical engineering as a career.

He ultimately switched to nuclear engineering and in December 2006 ended up at Shippingport, where he works on instrument and control systems in what is called “rapid response engineering.”

“There were a lot of opportunities. It was a very hard decision,” said Perry. He weighed offers from Intel Corp. in Portland, Ore., and several other companies elsewhere, as well as a number of smaller startup companies in this region.

“I really didn’t know anything at all about power generation or nuclear power until I entered the co-op program,” he said. “But I really was impressed with everything that happened, and I really like working out here.”

Also happy with his career choice is David Iorio, a Carnegie Mellon graduate, who now is a civil engineer for Sci-Tek Environmental.

Iorio said he had several interviews with companies in the region before taking a position at the 12-year-old company in October.

“There are opportunities here,” said the six-year engineer and Fairmont, W.Va.-native, who previously worked for a company in Morgantown, W.Va., under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Toran, Sci-Tek’s president and a former engineer with Westinghouse Electric Corp. founded Sci-Tek in 1996. He said the company is finding work with a variety of clients, including private commercial developers and public agencies. Among its clients is the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, which has begun work on a $3 billion project to repair and replace the county’s sewer system.

Coal industry giant Consol Energy has hired about 1,000 employees in each of the last three or four years, said Mark Hrutkay, manager of employee development. About 10 percent of those hires are engineers.

“We are in the midst of the ‘baby boomer’ phenomena and a surge in our industry for more coal to meet the worldwide demand for electricity,” he said. “We have a significant number of retirements and a need to staff new projects.”

The company employs about 8,000 overall, with more than 80 percent of those working in the tri-state area. Later this year it will move from Upper St. Clair to a new headquarters being built in Southpointe II in Cecil, Washington County.

State figures show the impact of growth in engineering companies large and small.

Jobs in a category that includes architectural and engineering services increased by 2,400, or 17.6 percent, from 13,600 in 2003 to 16,000 in 2007 in the seven-county Pittsburgh region, according to the state Center for Workforce Information and Analysis.

The legacy of big steel remains a factor in the presence of strong engineering companies here, said Ron Ashburn, executive director of the Association for Iron and Steel Technology.

The national trade organization, based in Cranberry, was created in the 2004 merger the Association of Iron & Steel Engineers and the Iron and Steel Society. It has more than 10,590 members nationwide, of which about 75 percent are engineers.

“We have reached a new high-water mark over the last decade,” said Ashburn.

Its Pittsburgh chapter membership grew from 1,408 in 2005 to 1,546 at year-end 2007, an increase of about 10 percent. The local chapter, which encompasses Western Pennsylvania and portions of West Virginia, is the largest of the group’s 21 chapters across the nation.

The group cooperated with a 2005 study by Pitt’s Center for Industry Studies that identified a flourishing cluster of 289 regional companies that serve the steel industry, including engineering firms.

The three largest builders of steel plants — SMS Demag Inc., Siemens AG and Danieli Corp. — all have their U.S. operations based in the Pittsburgh region and employ engineers, he said.

Steel production increased from 2006 to 2007 by 7.3 percent to a total of 1.32 billion metric tons, up 7.3 percent in 2006, he said. That means work for engineering companies in this region, and, with the average age of engineers in the region standing at about 52, even more job opportunities are emerging because baby-boomer workers already are starting to retire.

Companies expand

A number of companies offering engineering expertise have mapped plans for moving or expanding in the Pittsburgh region. A sampling of those projects include:

Westinghouse Electric Co. plans to move its campus to Cranberry and create 1,000 to 2,000 by 2016.

Siemens Environmental Systems & Services, formerly Wheelabrator Air Pollution Control, Downtown, pledged to create 550 in the region over the next three years. About 55 to 60 percent will be engineers or project managers.

Flour Corp., a Texas-based engineering company, is opening an office in Green Tree to serve the steel and aluminum industries and expects to employ 200 by 2009.

Venture Engineering & Construction, a startup company on Washington’s Landing, plans to hire 100 within the next 12 months.

Orbital Engineering in Pittsburgh plans to hire 20 new engineers immediately.

Source: Pittsburgh Regional Alliance

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