Engineers Confront Pace of Change, Talent Dilemma, Experts Say

DETROIT – Times, they are a-changin’.

To catch up with the evolving information-sharing and connectivity demands of today’s car buyers, engineering leaders must also change by adopting new work approaches, listening to emerging talent, better retaining that new talent and always keeping the end user in mind, a panel of futurists tell the 2014 SAE Convergence conference here today.

“The human value is sorely overlooked,” warns Janaki Kumar, head of Strategic Design Services-America, and head of the Design and Co-Innovation Center at software developer SAP Labs.

By the human value, Kumar refers to both the end user of a product and the men and women developing it.

“In the end, what does the user care about most, and that is also the most difficult” to determine, she says. Cost and convenience rank highest, she adds. “Think about the human being that will utilize the technology.”

SAP developed its Design and Co-Innovation Center to address the topic of the end user. The 2.5-year-old center in Palo Alto, CA, brings together key stakeholders involved in the finalization of a customer’s technology to share perspectives before taking the item to market.

Similar thought-sharing should also occur early in the development process, she offers, perhaps as soon as inception. Kumar says corporations should follow Silicon Valley’s lead and break down the walls between designers, engineers and marketers.

“Try it out,” she says. “Serendipitous collaboration will become the norm.”

Bret Greenstein, vice president-IBM Rational Software Complex & Embedded Systems at information technology services provider IBM, asks traditionally higher-ranking automotive mechanical engineers to more often listen to their younger peers in software engineering.

“The Internet of things and connectivity will be the most important going forward,” he says. “How will products communicate with each other, with the manufacturers, and with the users. That’s the challenge.”

Software engineers have the solutions, he claims, and those answers lie in the rapidly mounting piles of data engineers collect. Software engineers know how to filter that information for analysis and at a pace that matches consumers demand for quicker product updates and greater reliability, Greenstein suggests.

“This is what engineers are struggling with – how to design for the feedback loop,” he says. “That loop is getting shorter and more rich, (so) we must embrace software engineers.”

At the same time, the automotive industry faces a talent shortage, observes Sharafat Khan, principal-Deloitte Consulting.

Khan urges engineers to strengthen their connections with local schools by volunteering in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) studies. At the work place put a greater emphasis on skill-building and retraining to prove “just-in-time” talent to meet changing business needs, he adds, and help shift the perception of “national stars” beyond athletes and entertainers to include engineers, scientists and thinkers.

Give younger engineers bigger roles, too. “They get bored,” he says, citing statistics showing 70% of Millennial-aged employees leave an organization within two years.”

Khan says half-jokingly, “Let them bring their dogs to work,” like the tech industry.

But the talent glass might be half-full, argues Stefan Jockusch, vice president-Automotive Industry Strategy at Siemens PLM Software.

Jockusch says in emerging countries, such as India, STEM fields, rather than athletics or entertainment, are seen as the quickest route to wealth.

“In India, being a software engineer is cooler than being a cricket player,” he says.

IBM’s Greenstein sees engineering becoming more appealing to young people in developed nations, too, fueled by the rising popularity of comic-book based films. “In the super hero movies, the main character is both a hero and an innovator.”

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