How engineering companies handle accelerating turnover will be crucial to their future success—and it all depends on digitalization.
Siemens has submitted this article. Written by Dale Tutt, Vice President of Industry Strategy, Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Supply chain disruptions and the push for sustainable industries have come to dominate industrial conversation and discourse, and rightfully so—these are major areas of disruption and opportunity for companies. But there is another challenge causing uncertainty in industries around the world. There is an ongoing transition in the engineering workforce. Addressing this challenge will greatly help companies resolve the pressures coming from the shakeup in supply chains and the push for sustainability.
While workforce turnover is a constant fact of doing business, there are three signs that indicate this process has accelerated in recent years:
- Experienced employees are reaching retirement or moving into new roles, taking valuable knowledge as they move on.
- Software and electronics engineering skills are growing in demand in modern engineering teams.
- The next generation of engineers want to work for companies that can demonstrate sustainability, corporate responsibility and technological innovation.
In sum, as employees move on to new companies or roles, it is becoming more difficult to recruit and train new talent to replenish engineering teams.
What are the challenges created by the workforce transition?
Modern products are smarter, increasingly complex, and must comply with a greater number of rules and regulations around sustainability. Strategies for ensuring product compliance with these regulations may involve the use of new materials in the product construction, new manufacturing techniques, logistical optimizations to reduce the carbon cost of transportation, or any combination thereof. As a result, the list of design and engineering requirements and constraints, many of which have cross-domain effects or dependencies, is growing for the average product. Engineering teams are therefore faced with an ever-shrinking target to hit during product development as they manage a multitude of requirements and constraints.
Meanwhile, a workforce transition ensures that engineering and manufacturing teams are attempting to overcome the challenges of modern product development while potentially also navigating a leadership transition, the training of new team members, or a change in the composition of skills and training within the team. In either case, the workforce transition is forcing companies to confront unfamiliar challenges with a deficit of experience.
So, what can companies do to make it through this transition? The key is embracing digitalization through technology that is intuitive and easy to learn, starting in the areas of greatest need. Digitalization can help companies overcome growing challenges in the industries of tomorrow. Advanced digital technologies will help companies to foster collaboration, gather and leverage data and explore innovative solutions while saving time and money. With the benefits facilitated by these powerful tools, companies in all industries will be ready to seize the opportunities of tomorrow.

With a foundation of digital transformation, companies will also be more prepared to integrate advanced design methods and technologies, including AI/ML, augmented or virtual reality and the industrial metaverse. As we move into the future, these technologies will not only help companies confront the complexity of modern products, but they can also grant an advantage in the job market as new engineers look for cutting edge employers.
Advanced product design hampered by engineering turnover
Engineering teams are learning how to design and produce new and advanced products while also committing resources to the training of new team members. At the top level, the pressure to produce these advanced products while keeping costs in check, maintaining high quality, ensuring fast time-to-market and hitting sustainability targets is only increasing, especially as the competition becomes more dynamic.
To overcome these challenges engineering teams must find ways to be more productive with the same or fewer resources. They should seek to improve collaboration, particularly between engineering domains, and accelerate the training and integration of new team members. This is where leveraging the capabilities of digital solutions can make a difference.

Modern digital engineering environments can help create a continuous digital thread of engineering requirements, models, test results and other information by way of a model-based systems engineering methodology. This digital thread ensures the traceability and accessibility of information across the product development lifecycle. A key benefit of such a digital thread in the context of today’s workforce transition is its ability to free engineers from performing data management tasks and burning resources on the maintenance of databases. A continuous digital thread can also ease the acclimation of new team members into development processes. As engineering data is more readily accessible, new employees will have little trouble in locating the information they need to perform their duties.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are increasingly impactful in the workplace as well, including engineering teams. Modern engineering software incorporates AI to learn command patterns of the user. As the AI system learns, it is then able to suggest subsequent commands based on steps the user has taken and actions they will likely wish to use next. Some companies have leveraged this technology to capture the patterns of their current employees to develop internal best practices. These best practices can then be used to help flatten the learning curve for new employees, bringing them up to speed with the rest of the team more quickly.
Maintaining manufacturing throughput
The manufacturing environment is changing along with the next generation of products. For many companies, supply chain disruptions felt in recent years are motivating a switch to smaller, more local production facilities distributed around the world. Each facility will be constructed with a focus on flexibility, allowing them to produce a wide range of products to support the demands of the region in which they are located. This production framework relies on both a flexible and agile manufacturing facility, as well as highly adaptable technicians.
As production teams face many of the same challenges as their engineering counterparts, companies must develop methods of quickly training new employees on a variety of processes. Even as the use of automation and robotics increases to enable the future of flexible manufacturing, human technicians will continue to form a crucial piece of the manufacturing ecosystem. The combination of smart, well-trained technicians and their robotic counterparts will enable agile production with high throughput, quality and efficiency.

These mixed human-robot production environments can be supported by digitalization of the production design and training programs. With digital production planning and simulation tools, production designers can evaluate production line configurations, and entire factory layouts to design and optimize a flexible manufacturing environment.
Production designers can also evaluate each production line in detail. Each line will produce several product models or variants. Modern manufacturing design solutions allow designers to examine and validate the variation in work content in any given workstation and balance the workload routed to each workstation. Finally, engineers can leverage the virtual factory and production line models to plan and optimize factory logistics and material delivery. With consideration of the rate of production, planners can identify material delivery locations and review delivery routes and corridors, including the simulation of automated guided vehicles (AGVs).
Next, companies can leverage augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) to create immersive training experiences to help new technicians learn processes in a safe environment. Any mistakes can be quickly corrected by repeat sessions at a lower cost than physical training sessions. As we move further into the future of manufacturing, these technologies may also be used in live production environments to provide interactive instructions or other data to technicians as they work.

Industrial software partner helps drive transformation
The increasing sophistication of modern products and supply chains, new sustainability regulations in many industries and the challenges of a transitioning workforce are cause for many companies to seek industrial software partners to offer support and guidance during the digitalization journey. Strong software partners can offer integrated solutions for the entire product and production lifecycle, including hardware, software, electronics and more. They can also deploy these solutions in a variety of ways to fit the needs of the customer, whether that’s on-site or through a service-based model.
Ultimately, these partnerships can provide companies with the capabilities they need to manage the challenges of tomorrow. While product complexity grows and demands for sustainable practices become increasingly present, companies are also facing a large-scale transition in the engineering and manufacturing workforce. As experienced and knowledgeable employees retire or move into new roles with growing regularity, a new wave of talent is entering industrial workforces around the world. Ensuring these new employees are equipped with appropriate knowledge and tools will be crucial to surmounting the hurdles of the future.
Digitalization can provide a key advantage in this pursuit. Advanced digital technologies will help companies to foster collaboration, gather and leverage data, and explore innovative solutions while saving time and money. With the benefits facilitated by these powerful tools, companies in all industries will be ready to seize the opportunities of tomorrow.
To learn more about how to accelerate your digital transformation, check out our Siemens Xcelerator page.
About the Author

Dale Tutt is the Vice President of Industry Strategy for Siemens Digital Industries Software, leading the development of digital transformation solutions that address the industry specific needs of customers. Tutt joined Siemens in 2019 as the Vice President of the Aerospace and Defense Industry. Prior to joining Siemens, Tutt worked at The Spaceship Company, a sister company to Virgin Galactic, as the VP of Engineering and VP of Program Management, leading the development of spaceships for space tourism. He led the team on a successful flight to space in December 2018. Previously, Tutt worked at Textron Aviation/Cessna Aircraft in program and engineering leadership roles. As the Chief Engineer and Program Director of the Scorpion Jet program, he led a dynamic cross-functional team to design, build and fly the Scorpion Jet prototype from concept to first flight in 23 months. Tutt also worked as an engineer at Bombardier Learjet and General Dynamics Space System Division.