Where Will the Next Generation of Great Engineers Come From?

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Most young engineers do not grow up dreaming about careers in ceramic substrates or plating processes. It’s not because these careers are uninteresting. In many cases, young people simply do not know they exist.

They are excited about AI, robotics, aerospace, autonomous vehicles, space exploration, renewable energy, electric vehicles, medical technology, and advanced computing. What many students do not yet understand is that virtually every one of those technologies depends upon an incredibly sophisticated electronics manufacturing infrastructure.

Behind the glamorous finished product are engineers solving very real physical problems:  how heat will be removed from a high-power device, selecting materials capable of surviving the application, designing the substrate, developing the metallization system, establishing the manufacturing process, verifying reliability, investigating failures, and what happens when a theoretically perfect design encounters the realities of materials, manufacturing, temperature, power, and physics.

Those are fascinating engineering challenges, but our industry has not always done a good enough job of telling that story.

We can’t just post a job opening online and hope the right person happens to discover us. Recruiting needs to begin much earlier through relationships with universities, engineering programs, community colleges, vocational schools, professors, technical organizations, and student groups. Companies should be offering internships, participating in career events, sponsoring engineering projects, opening their facilities for tours, and finding opportunities to put young people in front of real manufacturing technology.

When a student walks through a modern manufacturing facility and sees advanced equipment, sophisticated materials, automation, precision processes, inspection technology, and engineers solving problems in real time, manufacturing suddenly looks very different from the outdated image many people still carry around in their heads.

The best recruiting program begins by making young technical professionals aware that an exciting industry is waiting for them.

Hire for Potential as Well as Experience

Entry-level positions should not require several years of experience. We cannot complain about the shortage of young technical talent while simultaneously refusing to give inexperienced people the opportunity to become experienced.

Experience certainly matters, but when hiring someone early in a technical career, I am equally interested in curiosity, intelligence, work ethic, humility, communication skills, and problem-solving ability. I want someone who is comfortable saying, "I don't know yet, but I want to understand it."

That word "yet" matters to me. Manufacturing has a wonderful way of teaching humility because the textbook explains what should happen while the manufacturing floor eventually teaches you what actually happens. The best engineers learn how to connect those two worlds. They understand the theory, but they also become comfortable walking out onto the manufacturing floor, talking with operators and technicians, examining the process, studying the data, asking questions, and discovering why reality did not behave exactly as expected.

The same is true for young quality professionals. Quality is much more than knowing standards, conducting audits, and completing documentation. Great quality people become students of the entire manufacturing operation because they want to understand not simply that something went wrong, but why it happened, what conditions allowed it to happen, and what needs to change so it does not happen again.

When you find that kind of curiosity in a young person, you have found something worth developing.

Give Young Engineers Something Real to Solve

Don’t make the mistake of protecting new hires from difficult assignments because they lack experience. There has to be appropriate supervision, of course, but young engineers need opportunities to work on real problems. Give them a manufacturing challenge and let them investigate it. Encourage them to study the process, examine the data, talk with the people who operate the equipment, consult experienced engineers, develop theories, test those theories, and present their conclusions.

Then sit down with them and discuss what they learned, from processes to departmental boundaries. The more quickly a young engineer learns to see connections, the more valuable that engineer becomes. It also gives younger employees meaningful work, which they are actively seeking. People want to feel that they are contributing rather than simply waiting until they have been with the company long enough to be trusted.

Put Experience and Potential Together

We have engineers, quality professionals, technicians, process specialists, and manufacturing leaders with 20, 30, and sometimes 40 years of experience. They possess an extraordinary amount of knowledge, much of which has never been formally documented.

An experienced engineer can sometimes look at a problem and recognize something almost immediately that might take a younger engineer several days to uncover. That is not intuition in some mysterious sense, but pattern recognition developed through thousands of hours of experience, successes, failures, experiments, customer problems, process excursions, material changes, and lessons learned.

If we allow those people to retire without transferring that knowledge, we will spend years relearning lessons we already paid dearly to learn.

Mentoring needs to become an intentional part of technical workforce development. Pair experienced professionals with younger employees, but do not treat the relationship as a one-way transfer of knowledge. The veteran engineer may possess decades of expertise in materials, processes, applications, and failure mechanisms, while the younger engineer may bring knowledge of data analytics, modeling, software, automation, and AI. Put those two people together and both can become better.

The real power of multigenerational technical teams lies not in the younger generation replacing the older generation, but in combining what each generation knows to build something stronger.

Help People Understand Why Their Work Matters

People increasingly want to know that what they do matters, and advanced electronics manufacturing has a tremendous story to tell in this area. The products we manufacture may eventually be used in the most advanced electronics applications, yet it is entirely possible for an employee to spend years working on a process without fully understanding where the finished product ultimately goes or why a particular requirement is so important.

We should change that whenever possible, by explaining the customer's application, showing employees how the product is used, helping them understand why tolerance, thermal performance, and reliability matter, and what happens to the customer's system if the component fails. A number on a drawing takes on a very different meaning when the engineer understands its application.

People also take greater ownership when they understand the purpose of their work, and ownership is one of the strongest foundations for both quality and employee retention.

Make Career Development Visible

We also have to recognize what happens after a talented young engineer or quality professional has been with the company for a few years. Eventually, that person begins asking a perfectly reasonable question: Where am I going? If the company cannot provide an answer, another employer probably will.

Career conversations should happen long before a valuable employee begins searching job postings. They need to see a path forward, where they can develop additional skills and take on new responsibilities.

We need to stop assuming that management is the only meaningful career path for talented technical professionals. Some outstanding engineers have no desire to manage people, and promoting a brilliant technical expert into a management position they do not want can actually hurt both the employee and the company.

Technical career paths matter: Senior engineer, principal engineer, subject-matter expert, technical specialist, mentor, innovation leader, or other advanced technical roles can give people something meaningful to work toward while allowing companies to retain their strongest technical talent.

People are much more likely to build a career with a company when they can see a future there.

Retention Is Built on Ordinary Days

Compensation matters, and companies have to remain competitive. Benefits, flexibility, advancement opportunities, and working conditions all play important roles as well. But I believe retention is ultimately built through the experience employees have during ordinary working days.

Does management listen when someone has an idea? Are employees encouraged to challenge the way things have always been done? When someone makes an honest mistake, does the organization look for a lesson or look for someone to blame? Are good contributions recognized? Do managers explain decisions? Are people given access to training? Does leadership demonstrate through its actions that employee development actually matters?

Young technical professionals have choices. If they conclude that they are no longer learning, growing, contributing, or being respected, they will eventually find somewhere else to do those things. Retention, therefore, does not begin when someone hands in a resignation. It begins on the employee's first day.

AI Will Increase the Value of Great Engineers

Young engineers entering our industry will use AI tools in ways many experienced professionals are only beginning to explore. I view that as an opportunity.

AI can help analyze manufacturing data, identify patterns, accelerate research, support troubleshooting, improve documentation, organize technical information, and, perhaps most importantly, help companies capture decades of tribal knowledge before it disappears.

At the same time, AI makes strong fundamental engineering knowledge more important rather than less important. Someone still has to determine whether an AI-generated answer makes physical sense. Someone has to understand materials, processes, thermal behavior, manufacturing limitations, reliability requirements, and the realities of the customer's application.

The best engineer will not compete against AI. They will know how to combine AI with technical knowledge, manufacturing experience, curiosity, judgment, and common sense. That should make advanced manufacturing even more attractive to the next generation.

We Have to Build the People Before We Need Them

There is no single solution to the shortage. Companies can build their own pipelines by reaching students earlier, creating meaningful internships, hiring for potential as well as experience, providing challenging assignments, connecting younger employees with experienced mentors, exposing people to customers and applications, investing continuously in technical training, and creating visible career paths.

Most importantly, we need to give young people a reason to become passionate about this industry.

At Remtec, our work involves electronics that are smaller, faster, more powerful, and more thermally demanding. Meeting those challenges requires advanced ceramic substrates, metallization technologies, materials expertise, specialized manufacturing processes, sophisticated equipment, and continued innovation. While important, none of them accomplish very much without knowledgeable, motivated people behind them.

Our industry spends an extraordinary amount of time and money developing new technologies. Perhaps it is time we started thinking about developing people with exactly the same intensity. Our responsibility is to help them discover and develop the necessary skills to become tomorrow’s inventors and leaders.

Brian Buyea is president and CEO of Remtec.