In this article, I’d like to discuss the alarming rate at which engineering professionals are leaving their firms today. This will continue for some time, but I want to share an image and analogy to help you think through how you can prevent your professionals from “jumping ship.”
After talking with some clients recently, I sketched out the cartoon (Figure 1) above, which provides an analogy to what many of our clients are experiencing today.
Imagine your company as a boat that is moving fast toward its destination of GROWTH. The bigger the boat gets, the more people you need to help keep it moving at the same rate. If you are like most of our clients, you are facing two big problems:
- You are struggling to find more people to come on to your boat for a variety of reasons, one of them being that there are many other boats in the ocean that you are competing with.
- Secondly, some of your people are jumping ship or leaving your boat for what they perceive to be a better one. Either they are looking for a better boat, or they are just burned out because you can’t find more people to come on your boat and help them.
Some firms acquire other firms to try to solve these problems, but all that does is bring more busy people onto the boat. They can’t help your existing employees. The only way to avoid these two problems and keep your boat moving toward your destination is to build a better boat!
How to Build a Better Boat
In a recent survey of over 700 engineering professionals on LinkedIn, 51% chose career growth opportunities as the most important thing to them, above high salary and bonus, great benefits, and work from home flexibility. Do you realize what this means?
This is how you can build a better boat…
If you take the time to develop a variety of career development programs and other initiatives, you can utilize them to recruit, develop, and retain your professionals. Here are some examples:
- A career roadmap that shows prospective and current employees all the possible career opportunities available in your firm (most companies don’t have this).
- Learning and development (aka training) programs that provide leadership and project management skills that can help them advance their careers (most engineers tell me they would leave their firms for better training programs over anything else).
- Additional programs like a mentoring program connecting your less experienced and senior professionals or a custom supervisor training (this is something all firms should do as one of their first learning and development initiatives).
I get it. These programs take time to build and more time for participants to engage in, but if you build them, you will overcome all the challenges that I outlined earlier.
How much would that be worth to your firm long term?
Your firm would go from being a good boat to a great boat…(Figure 2)
What is at stake if you don’t build a better boat?
Inability to do the work you’ve won. Lower retention rates. More money spent on recruiting and training new employees.
At the Engineering Management Institute, we’ve been working with companies to help them in some of these areas, including developing a hiring strategy, developing their staff’s key skills, and retaining staff at higher rates. Please message me or contact me at 800-920-4007 and we can schedule a complimentary call where we can better understand your specific needs and help you develop and execute a plan to overcome them — and we can do most of the work for you. We want to help you move from Figure 1 to Figure 2 by building the best boat on the ocean.
I am always available to you for a complimentary call to see if EMI can help you solve some of your biggest problems. I look forward to speaking with you.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn here.
