The Early Careers Of Engineers And The Accumulation Of Skills In The Canadian Economy

Engineering knowledge has an important component (the tacit dimension) that is acquired, developed, and enhanced through practical experience, or — conversely — that is never obtained or is lost due to the lack of such on-the-job applications. In this paper, we investigate various dimensions of the accumulation of skills for recent engineering graduates in Canada. While there appears to be a general belief that recent graduates face an increasingly difficult labour market, we find little evidence that this has been the case for engineers and there does not appear to be any widespread non-use, under-use, or mismatch of skills - at least, not up to 1992, the last year covered by the data.