The future is human

Over the past decade, I’ve had great opportunity to engage with our international professional community in thinking about the future of structural engineering through conferences, classrooms, writings, presentations and board meetings. Our collective passion for this subject is profound, offering an inspiring prognosis for us. Our world is changing and we need to adapt and evolve to remain relevant. For the engineering profession, it is time to adopt a more human-centric focus to better leverage technological innovation and use it to make a greater contribution to our society. Key drivers of change in the engineering profession include digital transformation, climate change and stresses on the urban environment. This creates an opportunity to reassess what it means to be an engineer, who we are and how we can be more inclusive of different skillsets, what we value and where we will find meaning, purpose and fulfilment in our future careers. For future success, we engineers need to focus on our human qualities such as empathy, creativity and connection. We need to redefine our essential skillset, which will require broader training, education and diversity. It will require us to set a direction for the profession in which we focus collaboratively on positive outcomes for society, and find a balance between business profi t and social value outcomes as measures of success. This leads naturally into the following questions: can we achieve these competing demands? Will technology enhance our ability to solve complex problems more quickly, resulting in a stronger and more desired profession? What does the future engineer look like?