Engineers Australia chief executive Peter Taylor, who will today speak at the Australian Technology Network of Universities conference in Perth, said: "With an estimated shortfall of more than 20,000 professional engineers to meet current demand in Australia, we continue to graduate fewer than 6000 each year.

"Even with the additional 1560 places provided by the Federal Government since 2006, by 2010 the number will be just over 6000 per year and still leave Australia at the lower end of the OECD league table for engineering graduates per head of population.

"While we accept that Australia needs to support a diverse professional skills base, there is no doubt that the Australian economy will suffer significantly if much more is not done now to greatly expand our domestic supply of engineers.

"The risk for Australia is that if we fail to build our vital domestic engineering skills, our resource industries will become even more dependent on fly in/fly out engineers, more design work will go off-shore, and our ability to translate good ideas emerging from Australia research into viable and competitive products will diminish further.

"While the tertiary and industry sectors need to work more closely together, a key component of the solution exists at the grass roots end of the education sector – within the school rooms across the country.

"Engineers Australia initiates and cooperates with many programs to excite the interest of school students in engineering.

"However, there are not enough teachers with tertiary qualifications in maths or science to enable the students to get enthused about and qualified for engineering tertiary studies. The problem is compounded by the different state and territory education systems.

"The collective solutions will only be found by the involvement of the profession, education sector, industry and government working together in every way we can."