The Changing Work Environment for Engineers Today

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Highlights from the Survey Results

• Slightly more than half of engineers (52 percent) said the pace of engineering is accelerating, and 57 percent said they are asked to do more with less.

• Forty-seven percent said that knowledge and/or information loss as employees left was very or extremely important. Yet only 43 percent of companies have formal practices in place to identify senior-level and specialized experts to train, transfer, mentor, manage or retain their knowledge among others in the organization.

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• Sixty-three percent said the number of designs/projects they work on has increased or stayed the same.

• Forty-six percent of engineers said technology is improving their productivity.

• Respondents agreed that designs are becoming more complex at the same time that design cycles are shrinking and time-to-market pressures are increasing.

• About seven in 10 respondents noted that constraints on resources, specialized knowledge, budgets and time were jeopardizing productivity, product quality and innovation.

• Designing and developing environmentally sustainable products was cited by more than 90 percent of respondents as an important part of their work. The sustainability strategies most often cited as influences on their projects are increasing energy efficiency (60 percent), reducing energy/resource consumption (46 percent), reducing emissions (39 percent) and using less toxic/hazardous parts and materials (39 percent).

• Customer satisfaction (60 percent) and product quality (57 percent) were the performance measures most often cited by engineers, with launch dates (24 percent) considered the single most important performance target they are pressured to meet.

• Seventy-five percent of engineers said they frequently met customer service and satisfaction targets.

• Eighty-three percent of respondents said they considered their company to be at least an average performer relative to their competitors.

• Only 40 percent of engineers said they were very likely to be with their current employer five years from now. Twenty-nine percent said if they were to leave their current role it would be to move to another company, while 23 percent said they would be retiring.

Pressure to Work Faster with Fewer Resources

Forty-six percent of respondents are working on more projects than they were two years ago, with 69 percent working on at least three projects concurrently. Fifty-seven percent are being required to do more with less. The majority of engineers also said that designs are more complex but design cycles are shrinking because of pressure to get products to market faster.

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