You have heard them all before: no interpersonal skills, prefer gadgets over
people, and let's not forget the tired clichés of pocket protectors and
slide rules. Yes, I am talking about those ever persistent stereotypes of engineers.
No matter how much engineers do to improve society through our innovations,
smarts, and hard work, as a group we are consistently dogged by old perceptions
that engineers are better off in the laboratory than in roles which require
significant human interaction with the outside world.
Well, like so many generalizations, when you get beyond the stereotypes and
look at the real data you find some startling facts - facts that in this critical
era of intense global competitiveness should lead to a rethinking of the role
of the modern engineer.
In today's reality, engineers are the new leadership class. Don't believe me?
Well, consider a recent survey of the S&P 500 CEOs by the global executive
search firm SpencerStuart. Of these 500 key corporate leaders, nearly a quarter
(23%) were educated as engineers and computer scientists.
In fact, engineering is the most common college major among S&P 500 CEOs,
with the number two, not surprisingly being business administration (15%).
However, when you appropriately adjust for the relative numbers of majors (U.S.
colleges and universities award four times as many business degrees as engineering
degrees) you uncover a striking fact: A young college graduate with an engineering
degree is approximately six times more likely than a graduate with a business
degree to become a CEO of an S&P 500 corporation - and not just among traditional
engineering companies. ExxonMobil may be headed by an engineer (Rex Tillerson,
BSCE), as is Texas Instruments (Richard Templeton, BSEE) and Raytheon (William
Swanson, BSIE), but engineers are also running financial institutions like Wells
Fargo (Richard Kovacevich, BSIE) and Harford Financial Services (Ramani Ayer,
BSChemE) as well as insurance giant Progressive (Glenn Renwick, BSME). The list
goes on and on.
So today, engineers are not only innovating our new products, but more importantly,
engineers are also leading the companies that build and sell these products.
This fact matters in our field. Because of concern about outsourcing technical
jobs, young engineers more than ever need to develop leadership and management
skills in addition to their technical competencies to help them stay relevant
throughout their careers. Many organizations already understand this and have
been creating professional development programs that enhance management skills.
However, universities have been slow in recognizing and addressing the broadening
of the engineer from technical expert to technical leader. This must be addressed
if our new graduates are to stay globally competitive in a marketplace where
foreign engineers are just as talented and come at fractions of the cost.
At my own institution, SMU engineering has focused much of our curriculum to
support engineering leadership training and development. As a consequence, two
very interesting and important things have occurred: The numbers and strength
of students matriculating into our program has increased dramatically while
the numbers of companies recruiting these multitalented students has also increased
in breadth and diversity.
So it's time to let go of the negative age-old engineering stereotypes and
replace them with one which is much more accurate: today's engineer is indeed
a global leader.
