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Features

Published February 2008

Engineering and Technical Leadership Development: Challenges in a Rapidly Changing Global Market

  

  Carl S. Vieth & Thomas W. Smith

A great deal of attention has been focused on the engineering and technical talent pool. Depending on the source and how the supply and demand of the talent is measured, we are either facing a severe deficiency or no shortage at all.

No matter which side you’re on, there is one critical factor often missing from the discussion — the increasing need for engineering and technical leaders. Myriad factors are affecting the growing shortage of qualified engineering and technical managers, including workforce demographics, globalization of the engineering enterprise, the acceleration of technology and organizational and business demands.

Engineering managers tend to be five years older than the average. Looking forward, the replacement rate for engineering managers will increase from an annual rate of 6.2 percent in 2003 to near 20 percent in 2014, which means there will be about 15,000 engineering managerial vacancies annually by 2014.

Compounding these demographics is the changing nature of the work. Engineering managers are challenged by significant organizational changes. Engineering or engineering-related occupations represent more than a third of the 40 professions identified by BLS as highly susceptible to outsourcing. This means that leading a corporate engineering enterprise will require management skills that extend well beyond an organization’s boundaries.

Similarly, the rapid rate of technological change requires engineering managers to have an ever-increasing breadth of technical competency. As organizations compete in the “knowledge economy,” the role of the technical leader will have increasing importance to an organization’s vitality.

The engineering enterprise also has changed significantly in recent years. Engineering leaders must lead organizations that are geographically distributed around the world. Engineering activities are performed in cross-functional teams rather than as individual projects.
Matrix corporate structures require technical leaders to include professionals from varying disciplines on engineering teams, as well as assigning their engineers to teams where duties are not traditional engineering. Engineers and technical professionals demand their leaders demonstrate a high level of technical competency — “street cred” is crucial to success.

Finally, organizations continually strive to be “lean,” which often translates to having fewer resources and putting a greater focus on day-to-day productivity. Today’s engineering organization provides tremendous technical leadership challenges, yet it is more dependent than ever on its leadership for success.

The State of Technical Leadership
Technical leadership is defined differently depending on the role of engineering within an organization. Titles such as “chief engineer,” “lead program manager” and “senior project manager” are used to identify managers and leaders of engineering and technical functions within an enterprise, though actual job descriptions vary widely.

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