Labor Shortage: Piper Training

Labor Shortage: US EPC’s Offloaded Piper Training to Overtaxed Universities

The US will find out what Canada and Australia already know:

There is going to be another shortage of Piping Designers.

To see it developing, you can’t go by the current, politically-suppressed capital expansion. You have to imagine what will result from continuing access to low priced Natural Gas and the inevitable expansion of domestic and offshore drilling and production.
So accept for a minute that demand for process plant Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) will increase.

SPED estimates that there are about 100,000 piping designers worldwide. Based on the number of CAD Piping Design seats sold and
maintained by the major EPC CAD system vendors, this estimate is probably low: Straight CAD and manual drafting is still widely used throughout the world. Assuming a 20 to 40 year career for the typical CAD capable Piping Designer, we need to be training about 2,500 to 5,000 pipers per year to repopulate the current workforce.

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