AI could ease Australia's 150,000 engineer shortage

Beca says artificial intelligence can help address Australia's engineer shortage, which it links to the nation's infrastructure pipeline.

Andrew Mailer, Managing Director of Beca Australia, said the country could be short about 150,000 engineers over the next decade as projects in water, energy, defence and commercial construction move ahead. He said artificial intelligence is already reducing the time needed for planning, design, consent and construction tasks.

The comments come as Australia faces pressure to deliver a major public infrastructure pipeline valued at AUD $242 billion. Concerns over labour shortages have grown as governments and businesses compete for specialist engineering staff across Asia Pacific and beyond.

Mailer pointed to Beca's work in the water sector as one example of how the technology is being used in engineering operations. "In our Australian water business, we've built AI assistants grounded in client- and region-specific standards that save an average of 30 minutes per complex data query," he said.

He gave figures for the current scale of that work. "With 160 engineers doing four complex queries a week, that's a saving of about 15,000 hours annually - and we intend to scale this to 700 engineers, with a saving of about 64,000 hours," Mailer said.

Skills pressure

The shortage is not limited to project design roles. Mailer said it also affects maintenance and operations, where asset owners need technical staff to inspect infrastructure, interpret information and plan interventions.

He cited a major Australian irrigation network with more than 13,000 assets. Physical inspections have been replaced by sensors and aerial, surface and underwater drones, while artificial intelligence analyses the high-resolution imagery gathered from those surveys.

Beca is also using digital twin models across a wide range of engineering and planning work. Mailer said those models cover regional council spatial plans, airports, critical assets, bridge design, air quality, carbon mitigation, hazard assessment and evacuation route planning.

He said the technology is improving both information quality and project speed. "In the hands of our skilled engineers, AI is making a material difference in the quality of information we're gathering and the speed of delivery of client projects," Mailer said.

Mailer said artificial intelligence should be seen as part of a broader response to labour shortages, not a complete solution. "AI is part of the matrix of solutions to address the acute shortage of engineers and deliver on the five-year Major Public Infrastructure Pipeline, currently valued at $242 billion by Infrastructure Australia," he said.

Talent competition

Longer term, he argued, the engineering pipeline depends on education and training. He cited industry data showing 8.5% of Australian graduates hold an engineering qualification, while only 8.4% of Year 12 students in 2023 were studying higher-level mathematics.

Those figures sit against a workforce that already relies heavily on migration. While Australia has more than 545,000 registered engineers, Mailer said overseas-born engineers accounted for an estimated 70% of growth in the country's engineering labour force between 2016 and 2021.

That reliance has sharpened debate over immigration settings as employers seek to fill specialist roles. Mailer said visa arrangements are not keeping pace with infrastructure ambitions at national, state and regional levels.

"In the short term, our visa and immigration settings need to be fit for purpose to fulfil national, state and regional infrastructure ambitions," he said.

He said the current framework is creating bottlenecks for employers trying to recruit internationally. "Currently there are chokepoints in the settings that result in delays or denials of qualified specialists from other countries," Mailer said.

Competition for those workers is global, he added, with employers in Asia Pacific, the UK, the US, Europe and South Africa drawing from the same talent pool. "Demand is everywhere," he said.

Mailer described the challenge as a clash between infrastructure needs and labour constraints. "AI can help unlock the conundrum facing Australia," he said. "On the one hand we have a growing population and a large infrastructure pipeline intended to rapidly meet the needs of water security, the energy transition and our defence capability - and on the other hand fiscally constrained governments, a national skills and productivity gap, geopolitical tensions and confronting climate challenges."