The Engineer of 2020
As our engineered world moves to complexity, unprecedented in history and largely unanticipated in the early and middle phases of the industrial era, engineering itself is becoming more complex. Even those aspects of human enterprise that are closest to raw nature, agriculture and animal husbandry, are increasingly technologized. Their steadily rising productivity depends upon engineered systems.
Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, a chipset maker which powers our modern smartphones in an interview elucidated the need to dramatically improve today’s engineering education. He emphasized that it’s not enough to provide our future engineering leaders with technical skills. They must also learn how to work in interdisciplinary teams, how to iterate designs rapidly, how to manufacture sustainably, how to combine art and engineering, and how to address global markets.
He further mentions that on the technical side, today’s engineering education seems stuck in the past. Professors often stand in front of students giving dry lectures based on notes they wrote years ago. With new rapid prototyping systems, students can now iterate on new hardware designs, in the same fashion as they quickly adapt and evolve the design of a web site or other software. They can then join together in teams, under the supervision of their professor and teaching assistants, to work on projects that are much closer to commercial quality, and therefore are much more exciting and motivational.
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in US asks an important question: Does it serve “the nation well to permit the engineering profession and engineering education to lag behind technology and society?”
To prepare the engineer of 2020 for that challenging future, the NAE undertook an in-depth study of how engineering education would have to change. Among the several recommendations are the following few:
- Bachelor’s degree should be considered a pre-engineering or ‘engineer in training’ degree.
- Master’s degree should become the recognized engineering ‘professional’ degree.
- Institutions should take advantage of flexible accreditation criteria in developing curricula and expose students to the essence of engineering early in their undergraduate experience.
- University education should produce engineers who can both define and solve problems.
- Institutions must teach students how to be lifelong learners.
- Engineering undergraduate programmes should introduce interdisciplinary learning and use case studies of both engineering successes and failures as a learning tool.
In its report titled ‘The Engineer of 2020’, NAE paints a picture of an interconnected world where those involved with technology will need to be multidisciplinary; and social, cultural, political, and economic forces will more significantly impact technological innovation. T h e reports says that successful future engineer will need strong analytical skills, practical ingenuity, creativity, good communication skills, business and management knowledge, leadership, high ethical standards, professionalism, dynamism, agility, resilience, flexibility, and the pursuit of lifelong learning.
Our perspective
Engineering is the process of envisioning, inventing, creating and building the world around us. Engineering is everywhere, and there are many different types of engineers – Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronic, IT, System, Chemical, Metallurgy, Aeronautical and more.
Indeed, there is a tectonic shift required in engineering education today. In a Knowledge society, the minimum acceptable qualification is a bachelor’s degree. For a STEM (Science, technology, Engineering, Maths) field, an ideal qualification is research level education.
We already have Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing support level engineers and soon we will have AI writing code as well; therefore, it is certain that support, coding or maintenance job will become tough to secure for humans. There will be more skills and knowledge desired for an engineer beyond her core subjects. Design, art, economics, sociology, software skills and various cross disciplinary subject will be a part of curriculum.
Moreover, in times to come, an engineer may have to revalidate his engineering degree every few years to be professionally competent to work as an engineer. Academics must be a forte and every engineer must be a self-learner; in fact, if a child is a self-learner then a formal engineering degree from a college may just be a waste of time, money and incur high opportunity cost in terms of lost opportunity to sharpen self-learning capability; enrolment into any of the online courses may well be the better choice.
Gazing through the crystal ball
- Increasingly, an ITI certificate is becoming good for many highly automated ‘Engineering jobs of today’. Thus, a truly ‘engineering job’ now calls for far higher and multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills besides end-to-end project management.
- Engineering degree by itself may not be the requisite passport to middle class lifestyle.
- Successful engineers will be versed with at least 3-5 engineering domains. A successful mechanical engineer will need a good knowledge of material engineering, electronics, software and design besides the core domain knowledge.
- Continuous self-education will be necessary; more so because engineering education will take very long, if at all, to catch up with multi-disciplinarity of domains. And engineers may have to revalidate their degrees every few years; in most of the developed world most professionals have to undergo certain volume of professional development courses during a period to continue to work as professional.
Following is a broad and illustrative future career outlook for specific engineering streams:
- Chemical Engineering : A huge employment growth for chemical engineers is envisaged in service industries such as scientific research and development services, particularly in energy and the developing fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology . Among the manufacturing industry, pharmaceutical will lead in demand for chemical engineers.
- Bio-Medical Engineering: The aging population and the focus on health issues will drive demand for better medical devices and equipment designed by biomedical engineers.
- Civil Engineering: Spurred by general population growth and an increased emphasis on infrastructure security, more civil engineers will be needed to design and construct safe and higher capacity transportation, water supply, and pollution control systems, as well as large buildings and building complexes. They also will be needed to repair or replace existing roads, bridges, and other public structures.
- Environmental Engineering: More environmental and sustainability engineers will be needed to comply with environmental regulations and to develop ‘green’ methods and buildings as we progress into the next decade.
- Mechanical Engineering: Employment of good mechanical engineers in manufacturing should increase as the demand for new-age machinery and tools grow across the world and as industrial machinery, resources and processes become increasingly connected, complex and local. Also, the emerging technologies in biotechnology, materials science, and nanotechnology will create new job opportunities for mechanical engineers. However, purely mechanical jobs will almost vanish, inputs of design, material science, software, electronics, biosciences, agricultural sciences will steadily increase in mechanical jobs.
- Electrical Engineering: Much like mechanical engineering, the better-prospect electrical engineering jobs will be in renewable energy, water treatment, biotechnology, navigational technologies.
- Material Engineering: Materials engineers will be needed to develop new materials for electronics, biotechnology, and plastics products. Growth should be particularly strong for materials engineers working on nanomaterials and biomaterials.
- Aerospace Engineering: Aerospace projects are evincing renewed interest even from the private companies and are likely to generate demands for aerospace engineers.
- Electronics Engineering: With ‘Internet of things’ being imminent and Moore’s Law (that processing power for computers will double every two years) running out of steam, shrinking the size of the chips without compromising its performance will be a major challenge for electronic engineers. The Electronic engineers will be required to explore materials beyond Silicon to greatly improve the capabilities of high performance computers, enabling Big Data to be analysed faster, increasing the power and battery life of mobile devices and the Internet of Things, and allowing cloud data centres to deliver services more efficiently and economically. Further, advances in Automotive, Defense, Energy, Lighting, Medical, Mobile and Robotics will be largely about electronics than anything else .This will entail that electronic engineers of tomorrow are versed with multidisciplinary knowledge of these diverse sectors to be effective or successful.
- Software Engineering: Software engineering is still a young discipline, being around for close to just 50 years or so. As we become dependent on trillions lines of code in the next decades, it will require software engineers that works at completely different scales and completely different constraints than today’s software. Some of the likely domains within software engineering to emerge are:
- Massive scale software coding: Software development will have to massively scale up in entirely new ways. In the United States, the recent software behind the health care insurance marketplace is a reported 500 million lines of code. In the next 50 years, as governments increasingly turn legal policy and services into
- source code and public APIs, Software engineers must be prepared to build massively-sized software systems on a regular basis. This will require cooperation with machine intelligence and with many other diverse stakeholders.
- Apps Ecosystem: With close to 1.5 million apps in each of Apple App store and Google Play store, millions of disposable apps will be created in future. The primary challenge for developer in this domain will be not in creation of the software but the management of its ecosystem: rapid iteration, instant distribution, insightful monitoring.
- Software Archaeology: Large software projects are built to run for decades but maybe unable to amass collective resources for updation. Current research ideas like reverse-engineering, mining software repositories techniques, program understanding tools may not be enough to ensure the longevity or recovery of knowledge and hence will need software engineers to develop more useful techniques.
- Software trainers: With artificial Intelligence becoming commonplace in future, software trainers will be required to show computer programs how to exist in our world, train them, and teach them how to learn on their own. They give the programs the basics on how to recognize objects, but the programs must learn how to put the pieces together.
- Designer software development: Designer development contends with game development as an enticing prospect for young ones entering the software industry. Designer software blends entertainment, hobbyists, fashion, home decor, and personal branding.
One of the pursuit of engineering is to improve lives of people in our planet. Many seemingly unsurmountable challenges have been conquered by engineers in the past century and certainly just as many more great challenges and opportunities remain to be realized in the present century. National association of Engineering (US) lists the following 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering in 21st century which shall keep engineers to transcend barriers and engineer path to future:
- Make solar energy economical
- Provide energy from fusion
- Develop carbon sequestration methods
- Manage the nitrogen cycle
- Provide access to clean water
- Restore and improve urban infrastructure
- Advance health informatics
- Engineer better medicines
- Reverse-engineer the brain
- Prevent nuclear terror
- Secure cyberspace
- Enhance virtual reality
- Advance personalized learning
- Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
