“Quicklook” Assessment of Greater Adelaide's Assets & Challenges ...

• Big negative: people move to Adelaide as a lifestyle decision which creates a
problem in recruiting particularly in software and systems engineering staff.
• This is not the center of commerce. The defense market is small and unprotected
in Australia – have to battle the world for business.
• Not enough graduates support their operations – they could employ 50 people
tomorrow if they had candidates. Engineering, electronics and computer science.
Aeronautical engineers are very difficult also. There needs to be a balance of
mature and fresh out engineers.
• Can they use immigrants – additional costs, but they also have other large
operations in US and Europe that need the same resources. They (competitors)
like Oz engineers and want to recruit them from here because they have a broad
based background. Asian students that are working here can now apply to work
here (this is a change from the past).
• They are working to influence the universities to produce more engineers. DoD is
unable to undertake all the R&D they would like to, so they can use the Uni’s to
do research and influence the curriculum. They are a single customer company in
this county and are held hostage to this.
• There is a culture among the youth that they want to leave here after studying.
One solution might be to offer overseas appointments for a few years. An
important factor is the availability of SW and systems engineers is that they feel
very secure in their job – they work on projects they want, not for “companies.”
• Larger projects are long and protracted and the engineers get bored because they
can’t see results of their efforts. They have lost a lot of engineers to the
communications sector. Cannot even hold them even by matching competing
offers. Motorola has 450 engineers across the road.
• More varieties of high tech jobs would help keep engineers here. The way to do
that would be to bring big contracts here. - The submarine contract is an example.
A complete facility was built out of a swamp – but this was never a company, but
merely a project, so what do you do with the workforce?
• Have MASSIVE peaks and troughs in industry.
• They are very influenced by what the US wants to do. Example is Taiwan – would
have bought submarines, so they couldn’t sell them to them because of
US/China. Not a technology issue, but an alliance issue.
• Ball Aerospace is a joint project. Also Raytheon/Lockheed Martin for the P3 Orion
project. There is a lot of original software for that project. 20 people on project.
• It is difficult to market back into the US market because there is a lot of
protectionism. They can put an item in to be evaluated, even if it is considered to
be good, the US partner tends to take the largest portion of the project (lose 90%
of it).
• Best opportunities are middle east and southeast Asia.
• Australian Industry Involvement (AII) is mandated for defence work.
• Engineers grow up to be managers – they aren’t engineers anymore.
• Engineering skill levels are second to none in the world, but management has a
long way to go.(and contract management). Operations Mission Simulator – the
challenge is to manage the program – applies to defence but is industry wide.
Industry that has the best handle on management is the Civil and construction
industry – could be addressed through management.
• Lose sight of the fact that this is a business and we are in it to make money. 99%
of all engineering projects, delivered projects are excellent, but schedule is often
incorrect.
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