Regurgitation
This comes up all the time: "We don't have enough people with <your choice of skill here>".
What they should be saying is that they don't have enough people willing to sit through hours of boring crap that will make virtually no difference to their future.
As to 'IT is changing so quickly', I agree with another poster who stated that the new shiny appear (and often disappears) quickly and often and always offering 'a new paradigm'.
I started out in electronics for money over 50 years ago and many, if not all, of the skills I learned then are still relevant today (although you wouldn't know it by looking at the electronics curriculum in many universities).
Certainly we have moved forwards in physics a great deal since then, but the fundamentals have not changed enormously (our understanding of quantum mechanics, on the other hand...).
I am comfortable in perhaps half a dozen languages (which I took the trouble to learn on my own time) and quite a few shells and scripting tools and even did some admin for a while (trying to bridge an AppleTalk network to Novell Netware was interesting).
In electronics, the vast majority of advances are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Modern microcontrollers integrate lots of peripherals onto a single package, but the fundamental operation is no different than using a device with a couple of peripherals and physically separate peripherals as we did in the 80s onwards; they just happen to be within a single package. The code to drive it is, basically, the same. Sure, we have much lower power per gate and a modern micro can run on the same power a single gate required in the 70s and 80s but that has been an incremental improvement driven, in large part, by IoT.
There have been numerous exceptional advances in physical devices (GaNFETs for instance) and digital circuit designers really need to understand transmission line theory (well, they do if they want to use modern high speed interfaces - simulators are great, but they can lead you very badly astray). The point is that none of these things require any really new knowledge; they require a thorough understanding of the underlying physics.
If someone understands the fundamentals properly, then they can understand anything built on it (which is just about everything).
As someone else noted, the skills necessary to get ahead will be largely personal effort.
On another front, the aptitude to be a designer is really only found in a small percentage of the population in the first place but those with that aptitude can also do finance. I suggest comparing starting salaries for both.
Oh, and stop calling someone who replaces a circuit board in the washing machine an engineer; they are a technician at best. The common perception of engineering is a repair mechanic, unfortunately.
I happen to enjoy electronics and embedded programming which is why I do it and keep up with developments in those fields which is perhaps part of the reason that my last 3 full time jobs were offered to me after I was 50 (I started the latest job aged 66).
The perception that formal education is supposed to turn out worker drones is fundamentally flawed and simply limits people to those of lower capabilities at least in the short term; there are some underlying fundamentals that everyone really needs to know, of course.
So stop complaining that there aren't enough people studying skill X and start teaching them how to think critically; the results might surprise the education establishment.