<p>This is an article from the National Academy of Engineering</p>
<p>it claims a dismal outlook on engineering and foreign competition.</p>
<p>Offshoring</a> and the Future of U.S. Engineering: An Overview</p>
<p>Please read the article before posting a response.</p>
<p>I wouldn't say it's a dismal outlook, but it's just something to be wary about.</p>
<p>I did some research on the outsourcing of civil engineering work when I was doing my master's. Some points in the paper I agree with but there were also some things that were not mentioned that would be problematic for outsourcing civil engineering work.</p>
<p>As Kenney and Dossani pointed out, the problem with outsourcing is not due to the lack of educated engineers abroad. I worked with a bunch of students at one IIT campus and they were more than intelligent enough to perform the work U.S. engineers do. If anything, I found their academic workload to be more intensive than what we have in the United States. </p>
<p>The difficulties with outsourcing parts of a civil engineering project out lies not so much with the technical aspect, but more of the cultural aspect. The obvious points to mention are the communication barriers. In my research, everybody spoke English, but there were still plenty of problems understanding each other. Different terminologies, different accents, different abbreviations, different styles of writing, different body language, etc. all contributed to communication issues. </p>
<p>One thing people should know is that civil engineering in India is not necessarily the same as civil engineering in the United States. The guys in India had a lot of problems understanding the drawings from the U.S. In particular, they couldn't really understand steel drawings and plumbing drawings. Buiding methods are also pretty different between the two cultures.</p>
<p>Now, is it possible to train foreigners in American building methods and engineering? Yes, I believe so. However, at what point does it become worth it? Indian civil engineers aren't exactly struggling for jobs with all the work they have to do domestically. </p>
<p>Civil engineering is just an oddball creature in that it's a field that tends to be very local, even within the United States. You rarely see a firm on the west coast do a project on the east coast. Civil engineers are usually experts in their own cities, but once you move out, there's a learning curve. Different site conditions, different building codes, etc. </p>
<p>And don't forget that putting up buildings doesn't involve just one firm. On my current project, there's over 100 different stakeholders involved right now. Being able to work with others is a big key to success in this business. You just can't do the work by yourself. For a foreign company to jump in would be immensely difficult for everybody.</p>
<p>Contrast this with automobile manufacturing for example. In that industry, you can pretty much do everything within one company in another country and just ship the final product to the U.S. The only people you theoretically need here are the people to market and sell the product. The main difference is the need for on-site personnel in the U.S. and the amount of interaction needed with these people.</p>
<p>Just to add to what Ken said (and I printed out the article and read it on the bus home today), it's <em>incredibly</em> difficult to work-share projects. Our company is set up such that when one office is doing really well and other offices don't have a lot of projects, we can shift work from one office to another, but it's like pulling teeth to do that. Having watched it happen so painstakingly, with our having put forth such a massive effort in standardizing our methods of design, I can't even imagine the horror of trying to ship structural work overseas. It would end up being so much more expensive, because the folks back here would have to spend so much time cleaning up the work-- not because the engineers overseas are incapable, but because the projects are so incredibly complex and it's amazingly difficult to keep a consistent design when you don't have all your engineers in one place (to say nothing of having to comprehend foreign building codes!!).</p>
<p>So, sure, you say, you can instead just ship the entire project overseas. But like Ken said, there are a lot of different players involved, and plumbing and steel drawings are pretty U.S.-centric. It'd be very difficult, and more costly, to ship <em>everything</em> overseas.</p>
<p>In fact, in the design industry (particularly of healthcare facilities, who are big into this concept with their own operations), one of the big buzzes is "lean design," or "integrated project delivery". It's kind of a take on the Toyota methods of design. You have (I love this phrase) "extreme teamwork," where you get ALL your team members in one place, and have them do the entire project together, housed in one set of offices, to apply pressure to work as a team and cooperate to get the job done early and without wasted labor. It's a cool idea, and the few projects that have been done with it have been pretty darned successful. It would be very unlikely that you'd be able to offshore that entire operation. (Would you be able to find engineers and designers of all requisite expertise who are also accustomed to working with American design codes?) It would also be unlikely that you'd need to, with the presumptive savings in cost from having streamlined the design process.</p>
<p>There are other options aside from offshoring-- it's just not that feasible with civil and structural engineering.</p>
<p>I am currently reworking specs and drawings developed with the help of an Indian design firm. They did an excellent job, however there are many mistakes that can really be owed to the langauge barrier and lack of organization that exists in their organization. </p>
<p>With that said, I don't think outsourcing is a problem, nor would I call it outsourcing. I work for a small consulting firm, and we compete with companies like Fluor and Jacobs on a small niched scale. Not only that, but our business is international, because of our niche. Because of local codes, cultural barriers, and time differences we are benefited in more ways than just cost by using local engineering companies. These are cooperatives, IMO, and not outsourcing. Personally, I wouldn't souly use a company in India to design a plant that would be built by Americans, nor vice versa.</p>
<p>Larger firms may have the incentive to tap the intellectual equity of other companies with a much larger impact to their bottom line. However, most engineering companies aren't that large. The large ones will do a good job at spreading the wealth and knowledge, which is a good thing. The smaller, and more plentiful, ones will help turn factory engineers into global engineers. It's a global economy, we need to wake up. I like the article in that it encourages a charge on engineering education, and favors better salaries for better value added deliverables.</p>
<p>The engineering company I used to work for did the same as Japher's. We partnered with a company in India to do a project there. In cases like these, the reason for offshoring isn't for monetary reasons, but for expertise. This is true especially for niche firms. </p>
<p>In either case, there are still barriers to overcome. Offshoring / outsourcing is not without its faults in this industry.</p>
<p>I should note that it is not impossible; it would just be very challenging and not worthwhile to do on a few ordinary projects here and there.</p>
<p>Take a look at CRGP</a> - Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects at Stanford if you're really interested about global projects. Its focus isn't on outsourcing, but global projects in general. I believe most of the projects discussed are located outside of the United States, so it's really a two-way street. We ship work out of the country, but we also get work from elsewhere.</p>
<p>I have to agree with the other posters here and, actually, with the conclusion of the article itself: that the outlook is hardly dismal. If anything, there is actually significant potential upside of globalization to properly educated engineers. But that's the key: to be properly educated. </p>
<p>What it means to be properly educated is not so much a matter of going to top schools (although that might help), but really to learn the right things at those schools. Just as the article said, engineers of the future will have to learn to take on more management responsibilities, i.e. coordinating projects whose individual pieces may be handled by various outsourcing entities. Hence, the purpose of an engineering education will not be so much to actually perform the actual gory tasks of a particular engineering project, but rather to gain deep insight into technical matters that allows you to interlink various engineering projects. Similarly, engineers will also have to learn how to become more entrepreneurial - to be able to see innovative possibilities that are enabled by connecting various technologies in novel ways. Note, that doesn't necessarily mean that engineers will all have to be founding their own firms or joining startups, although many future engineers will probably indeed be doing that. Many large firms employ internal entrepreneurs/innovation-teams whose task is to piece various company resources together to discover new business opportunities. They even have a name for it - "intrapreneurship". Many of 3M's projects, such as Scotch Tape, were invented by employees who were encouraged to explore their 'intrapreneurship' instincts. </p>
<p>What I would add to the article is that I believe future engineers will need to be far savvier marketers and communicators than they are now. It will not be sufficient to simply know technology, you will also need to be able to properly present that knowledge in a way that your audience can understand, whether that audience are end-customers, or VC investors, or managers at your firm, or whatever. That will mean that you will need the engineering background to handle whatever technical questions may arise, as well as the cultural and social skills to build rapport with your audience.</p>
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you will need the engineering background to handle whatever technical questions may arise, as well as the cultural and social skills to build rapport with your audience
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<p>So in order to keep work here, US engineers must have excellent communications skills? Apparently these skills aren't considered so important when deciding to offshore jobs.</p>
<p>I think it's ironic that the promise of increased telecommuting never really happened, for management-related reasons (too hard to keep track of workers, etc.) but we've gone directly to offshoring.</p>
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So in order to keep work here, US engineers must have excellent communications skills? Apparently these skills aren't considered so important when deciding to offshore jobs
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<p>Well, I think you need excellent communications skills no matter what job you take, but it's never been more true because of offshoring.</p>
<p>Why? Because Americans will always (naturally) have a competitive advantage when it comes to communicating to other Americans, just like anybody has an advantage when it comes to communicating with their own people. Cultural familiarity is extremely difficult to outsource.</p>