Engineering students and newcomers to the auto industry are unfazed by the deep job cuts and troubles the industry has suffered in recent years, especially those looking to become tomorrow's electric vehicle engineers.
"Electric and hybrid vehicles are for the future. They can be for any part of the world but also in the U.S.," said Krishna Jasti, 24, a graduate student in Wayne State University's electric vehicle drive engineering program.
Domestic automakers -- on the cusp of emerging from nearly a decade of job cuts and market-share losses -- are scrambling to fill thousands of engineering positions after shedding thousands over the past 10 years through job cuts and early-retirement offers.
GM, Ford and Chrysler are working with colleges and universities to develop courses to train and retrain the engineers who will be expected to develop tomorrow's electric and hybrid cars, and are trying to recruit from other industries.
But automakers face the challenge of recruiting people to join an old-guard manufacturing industry after years of job cuts and salaried buyouts.
"For me, it's a minor bump right now. The industry has a long, rich history," said Rhet De Guzman, 26, a Ph.D. student at Wayne State University. "I can see that this is a solid industry."
This year, U.S. auto industry sales are expected to increase about 10 percent to 12.5 million. But that's still a far cry from the 16 million or more sold annually for most of the last decade.
"I have confidence that the auto industry will come back," said Rihong Mo, 50, who left General Electric's locomotive division in November, after more than 11 years with the company, to lead a team of engineers at Ford. "This is the frontier of electric motors."
That's good news for automakers, said David Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., who has been warning of a coming talent shortage in the auto industry for years.
"There are a lot of companies looking for people with certain skill sets," Cole said. "It's creating a dilemma and it is just the start."
De Guzman, who is from the Philippines, could have pursued an engineering career with the oil and gas industry.
Instead, De Guzman is trying to figure out how to improve the conductivity of lithium-ion batteries and hoping to work for the domestic automotive industry.
"When I was working in the refinery, I could see what it was doing to the environment," De Guzman said. "So, I went from nongreen to completely green."
De Guzman is among the new engineers who view the auto industry as a place where fuel-efficient technology is advancing at a rapid pace and an opportunity to improve the environment.
And, after years of scaling back, General Motors and Chrysler are hiring 1,000 engineers each while Ford wants to hire engineers to fill many of the 750 salaried positions it plans to add over the next two years.
In most cases, the automakers are looking for engineers with hard-to-find skill sets and sometimes want years of experience. That has the companies scouring the country for talent and universities working rapidly to retool their courses to meet the demand.
"We need more students going into engineering and into the automotive industry," said Leo Hanifin, dean of the University of Detroit Mercy's college of engineering.
With Ford's assistance, UDM established a seven-course graduate certificate program in 2009 to provide additional training to Ford engineers and others.
About 150 have entered the program and 28 received their certificates in December, Hanifin said.
In 2009, Wayne State University and Macomb Community College received a combined $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a program to retrain engineers and turn out new ones for work in an industry in transition.
WSU and UDM are just two of the colleges and universities in Michigan adapting to the new demands of the auto industry.
"The approaches that everybody is taking may vary," said Steve Salley, associate professor of engineering at WSU. "The technology is changing so rapidly, sometimes the old courses don't incorporate the new concepts."
GM and several other companies are working with 16 colleges and universities across the nation in an initiative called Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education to develop advanced engineering programs.
Karl Stracke, GM's vice president of global vehicle engineering, said today's automotive engineers must be cross-trained in several different types of engineering.
GM, which employs about 36,000 engineers globally, expects to add at least 1,000 this year, Stracke said.
Chrysler plans to fill its 1,000 openings with about 60 percent direct hires and 40 percent contract engineers, said spokesman Michael Palese.
Ford has been aggressively recruiting engineers from across the country since Thanksgiving, said Chuck Gray, Ford's chief engineer of electric vehicle engineering.
Gray said Ford has received several hundred resumes just for electric vehicle engineering positions.
Despite a surge in hiring, engineers who lost their jobs over recent years may find it difficult to get jobs without additional training in electric vehicles.
A three-credit retraining course in advanced propulsion technology offered by Michigan Technological University fills every semester, said Jennifer Donovan, spokeswoman for the university. The course is only open to out-of-work automotive engineers with degrees.
It's also difficult to find college programs that provide electric-vehicle engineering courses, said Kevin Snyder, 40, who works at Chrysler as a vehicle testing engineer.
Ten years ago, when Ann Marie Sastry, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan, started teaching courses in advanced batteries, fewer than 20 would sign up. Several years later, it was drawing more than 100 per class.
Still, Sastry, who also is CEO of lithium-ion battery startup Sakti 3, said universities must strike a balance between curricula that train students for the future without getting ahead of the industry.
"There is no major automaker without a serious play in hybrid and electric vehicles," she said. "But these vehicles, in the aggregate, comprise well under 10 percent of the consumer vehicle portfolio."
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