As a consultant who spends a lot of time working on virtual team challenges of engineering companies, the engineering project skills for the future is often on my mind. The last few decades have each brought one or two major changes to the way major engineering projects are delivered, the big question now is what will the next phase require of the workforce.

Engineering project skills of the past

* In the 80’s, the change was the arrival of design automation tools, including equipment such as computerised design software. They led to an improvement in the speed of production of drawings (along with the equivalent ease of changing the design, which was not always as welcome). It also brought the initial development of engineering databases and associated tools. All of these new tools reduced the size of the team needed to deliver the work, one of the major contributors to a lot of people leaving the workforce at the time.

* During the ’90’s the tools continued to change and communications expanded on a world wide scale. During this decade we moved rapidly from early fax machines and slow electronic transmission of data to high speed internet traffic, email, FTP and VPN which really connected the whole globe in a robust and rapid way for the first time. This communications revolution supported the development of the first real virtual teams working to deliver project from their homes and offices across the globe. For the first time, you began to have the ability to do the same work from your home as you could from your office and it began to matter less where that home or office was located.

* The ’00’s was a decade of massive expansion, when bigger and bigger were better and better. Client companies demands and expectations were that they should be able to develop larger and more complex projects faster and cheaper than ever before. This was pursued through the leveraging of the expanding design software and virtual teams of personnel able to work on their project 24hrs a day from somewhere in the world, in many cases, theoretically at a lower cost through the use of lower cost labour.

Against all of this technological and aspirational development has been the impact of the ageing population on the available workforce. Much of the developed world experienced mass departures of highly skilled and experienced personnel from the workforce in the ’80’s and ’90’s. Many of these departing personnel were viewed as dinosaurs by their younger colleagues, they didn’t have, and often were not interested in developing, the computer skills required to work in this new age and were readily released.

However, over time, the skills these experienced personnel had, their very experience of the technical demands of their work which were so quickly discounted during the first flushes of the IT revolution, came to be missed, though largely too late to reverse.

This ageing and departed workforce were not replaced by their former employers. Those running the engineering companies largely retained the abundance mentality of previous decades, when there was always a ready and stable supply of skilled workers to fill any vacancy. This belief was shown to be flawed during the boom times of the second half of the last decade. During the boom skilled personnel were at a premium and these same employers were crying out for personnel to fill their vacant roles, accepting partially skilled alternates and paying above market rates to secure them.

So, here we are, in the second half of the 2010’s and wondering what is coming next, particularly when we keep hearing about how automation is going to lead to so many jobs disappearing or being replaced.

Where next for engineering project skills

My prediction, is that the industry activity over the next few years will stabilise at a lower level than the past decade or ...