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The Shaughnessy Report: Back to the Future

It’s no big secret: There’s a shortage of PCB designers and design engineers, and we don’t have enough of a pipeline to fill these seats. To top it off, the last batch of designers from the Baby Boomer generation is approaching retirement.

Young people should be lining up to become PCB designers. Designers can have a lucrative career while working on the latest technology for products that fit on your wrist, go to Mars, or go really fast one way and never come back. But we have to do a better job of marketing this as a career to high schools and colleges if we want to see a steady stream of future designers.

This is probably the most fun time to be a PCB designer. With innovations like AI coming online, changes will be coming fast and furiously, both for the products and the EDA tools themselves. Duncan Haldane’s EDA company JITX was a big hit at DesignCon 2025; his AI-enabled PCB design software can—allegedly—speed up your design cycle by 30x. (Five years ago, I couldn’t get anyone to talk about AI.)

It will probably take a combination of efforts—apprenticeships, scholarships, and partnerships with high schools and colleges—to “prime the pump” with the young, trained PCB designers of the future. But the time to act is now.

This month, we asked our expert contributors to address these questions: Where will we find the next generation of PCB designers and design engineers? Once we locate them, how will we train and educate them? What disciplines will the designers of the future need to understand and master to deal with tomorrow’s technology?

We have a great interview with design instructors Kris Moyer and John Watson, and a conversation with Garmin’s Laura Beth (LB) Yates, who is managing the company’s drive to recruit new designers. We have feature articles by Cory Blaylock, Stephen Chavez, and Bill Hargin, and a column by Kelly Dack, who takes a philosophical view of this situation. We also have columns by Matt Stevenson and Joe Fjelstad, and another article in Anaya Vardya’s continuing series on UHDI. Finally, I share a preview of the upcoming technical conference at IPC APEX EXPO.

If your company has a PCB design training or apprenticeship program, let me know by clicking here. See you next month.

This column originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Design007 Magazine.