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Generational Issues Archive
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The New Management Forum at the CIC Conference
Posted on February 16, 2011 | 2 CommentsAlthough I've never been able to attend in the past, I've always thought that the Collaboration and Interoperability Congress (event website) took on some intriguing topics. CAD interoperability. PLM integration. 3D visualization. Thinking one day that I'd like to get involved in some way, I reached out to Dave Prawel of Longview Advisors, who runs the CIC event, to see if he was interested in getting some help with the event. -
U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Projections for the Engineering Profession
Posted on December 8, 2010 | 5 CommentsAll this set me off to find some definitive source of occupational projections around the engineering profession. And wouldn't you know it, there's a highly credible source that's readily available. The United States Department of Labor released a fairly comprehensive projection for the decade between 2008 and 2018 across all functional professions with a specific area that focuses on engineering. -
An Evolving Analogy of Technology Adoption by Engineering Generations
Posted on November 23, 2010 | 4 CommentsIf you've been reading posts here at engineering-matter.com, I'm sure by now you know I write a good bit about generational issues in engineering as well as the software applications and systems used in engineering organizations. As you might imagine, I started to think about these two issues in light of one another. Specifically, my mind started work on the question: how have different generations adopted technology in the engineering office? -
Future Now: GenY Stepping into Boomer Engineering Roles
Posted on November 8, 2010 | No CommentsBack in September, in one of the very first posts on the generation gap in engineering, I wrote about how the age profile of an engineering organization resembles a saddle. There are lots of Boomer engineers, much fewer GenX engineers and quite a lot of GenY engineers. In that post, I included an excerpt from a discussion I had with Howard Schimmoller, who had this to say about the implications of such an age profile. -
Honing in on the Source of Conflict on Multi-Generational Teams
Posted on October 21, 2010 | No CommentsIn this series, we've talked a lot about the characteristics of generations and how different they can be. But as of yet, we really haven't delved into why those differences can lead to conflict in the workplace. To start with a baseline, let's take a look at Tammy Erickson's post on the Four Biggest Reasons for Generation Conflict on Teams from the Harvard Business Review blog. -
The Debate over Differences at Work across Generations
Posted on October 13, 2010 | 3 CommentsBack in July, Rawn Shah who is a consultant for social networking for business over at IBM, contributing an interesting post to Forbes.com called Why You Must Network With Your Younger Employees. Now I disagree with Rawn on several points in this post including his statements saying that Boomers hoard and control information and the fact that he grouped GenY'ers and Millenials together, but he posted a very interesting table that compares and contrasts some characteristics across generations. -
The Challenge of GenY’s Expectations for Engineering
Posted on October 4, 2010 | No CommentsDo you remember what is was like when you were first hired as an engineer? Do you remember the type of work you did? Did you enjoy it? Was it fulfilling? I imagine some of you are laughing at that last question. But in all seriousness. Think about it. Now hold on to that thought while we start to talk about Gen Y engineers. These are the people just graduating from engineering school and getting their first job. They're just starting off their professional career. Think they're in the same mental state you were in? Actually, that's very unlikely. -
The Flight Risk of GenX Engineers
Posted on September 30, 2010 | No CommentsTo get some perspective on what the Gen X mindset looks like in a professional environment, I'm going to turn back to Tammy Erickson at the Harvard Business Review (HBR) again. Across a lot of blog posts and publications, things aren't so mixed bag for Gen X. They're sandwiched between two much larger (in terms of volume) generational cohorts, the Boomers and Gen Y, leading to a lot of dissatisfaction. However, they exhibit the sort of characteristics that engineering organizations need the most right now to bolster economic recovery through new product development. -
Time to Push the Alarm? The Braindrain Threat from Boomer Engineer Retirement
Posted on September 14, 2010 | No CommentsIf there were an even distribution of engineers across age groups, then retirement of an entire generation would take away about a third of your staff. However, the saddle shape of the age employment curve means that many engineering organizations are heavily front loaded with Boomer engineers. Furthermore, the far smaller group of Gen X engineers means that there's not a one-to-one tenured replacement for every retiring Boomer. -
Is the Age Profile of Engineering a Saddle?
Posted on September 8, 2010 | No CommentsImagine if we mapped the number of engineers (y-axis) against their age (x-axis) for a particular engineering organization. What would the distribution curve look like? Well based on historical hiring demand and the relative sizes of different generations, we can project what it would look like. It resembles a saddle.