Want to keep your engineering job? Then keep up with digital transformation

It’s easy to think of digital transformation as merely a technology transformation. Paper to email. Drafting to CAD. Offline to online.

But technology doesn’t change by itself. It’s the people behind those changes that ultimately determine the success or failure of a digital transformation. The people must transform too, and for engineers, this transformation is already apparent.

Engineers in the digital age are facing new challenges and opportunities that are redefining what it means to be an engineer. The profession is evolving in ways that aren’t always easy to predict, but there are steps engineers and employers can take to keep pace with the transformation.

Engineering on hard mode

Engineers today are being asked to do more with less. Changing consumer expectations have created pressure to deliver products faster, with more features and for less money. As soon as one product hits the market, customers already anticipate the next iteration. These shorter development cycles also require more interdisciplinary collaboration, with electronics and software playing a major role in many more products. Engineers must also collaborate more closely with other departments in the company to ensure that products are built on time and in line with customer expectations. Add on an environment of intense global competition, and it seems that engineering has reached a new difficulty level.“I think that it’s much harder for engineering today as a business function,” Asi Klein, a managing director at Deloitte, told engineering.com.

Even so, that doesn’t mean that the average engineer is struggling to keep up. The job may be getting harder, but the tools to do it are getting better, according to Dale Tutt, vice president of industry strategy at Siemens. Tutt believes that modern engineering software has simplified certain aspects of the job, providing a counterbalance to the increased pressure on engineering departments. He points to innovations like automated meshing and generative design, and the emerging potential of AI to automate mundane or repetitive tasks.“On the one hand, there’s a lot of complexity out there and it’s changed the skill set that’s required for engineers,” Tutt says. “On the other hand, I think that digitalization and digital tools have really made some aspects of the engineering life a little bit easier, and maybe freed up their time to focus on those difficult problems.”

Staying up-to-date with the latest digital tools is important for engineers, who should seek to maintain mastery of their design software as it evolves to incorporate new features and workflow shifts. Unfortunately, some engineering companies are still lagging behind in adoption of these tools, according to Klein.“Plenty of our clients are still operating basically offline… So having the right enterprise tools is a good place to start as a foundation,” he says.Engineers can build on that foundation by looking to emerging technologies that could impact their workflows. There’s no shortage of new tools and technologies to explore, from novel ways of computing like augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) to new methods of collecting and analyzing data like the Internet of Things and the exciting new frontier of artificial intelligence with the myriad opportunities it presents.But for engineers to stay ahead of the pack, comfort with new technology is only half of the equation. The role of engineers is evolving beyond technical sophistication.

The need for talent mobility

As engineering requirements become more complex and engineers adapt to new technologies, one attribute will be key for engineers: versatility. Engineers have always benefited from soft skills like communication, teamwork and emotional intelligence, but these and other non-technical skills will become even more important in the digital age.Klein considers these as leadership skills. “It’s customer management skills,” he says. “It’s facilitate skills, it’s storytelling skills, it’s business acumen. It’s the types of things that typically you’re not going to think about as an engineer because it’s such a technical role.”As customer expectations continue to increase, it will no longer enough for an engineer to merely gather requirements and design a product. Engineers with leadership skills will provide better customer service, collaborate more effectively with other engineers and departments, and ultimately be better prepared for any changes that are in store for the profession.

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