May 6, 2015
The Unequal Job Future for Engineers
The discrepancy in 18-year job outlook for different types of engineers might surprise you. In America, we’ve been told we’ll face a dearth of engineers in the near future. We’ve learned to encourage students to major in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, as that’s where the job growth will be. Over the next few decades, we expect to …
March 7, 2012
Stay Late or Go Home: Do Engineers Have a Choice?
I make an effort to read up on what’s going on the engineering world. Obviously, it’s relevant to what I write here at this blog. It helps me gauge what’s going on with lots of things ranging from technology, to engineering managerial issues to trends in engineering careers. One of the blogs I follow is the Harvard Business Review (HBR). …
January 14, 2012
Mitigating the Engineering Brain Drain Threat
The impact of the retirement of Boomer engineers is something I have been tracking for some time. It poses a serious threat to productivity in engineering organizations. While there are process and organizational changes that can be made to address that threat, there are also some technologies that can make an impact as well. The folks at Cadalyst approached me …
Not long ago, I wrote an Introduction to Talent Management post that put that topic in the context of the engineering organization. I followed that up by looking at the question of What's the Importance of Employee Alignment in Engineering? Today I'd like to delve into a issues that is direct related to engineering executives: succession management.
November 30, 2010
Are Engineers and Their Employers Growing More Distant?
It seems that lately there has been a lot of talent management issues in engineering. With that in mind, I came across an interesting article written by Jeffrey Pfeffer over at the Harvard Business Review called Take Care of Yourself First.
Sometimes, it's the simplest questions that are exactly the hardest ones to answer. In a post last week, I wrote about a book I read some time ago called The Goal (wikipedia entry). In it, the main character struggles to identify both the goal, increased profitability, and constraints of that goal, production bottlenecks and sales limitations, in a manufacturing plant he oversees in an effort to save it from being shut down. Based on that premise, I asked what the analogue is to engineering. What exactly is the goal for engineering? What are the constraints keeping engineering from that goal?