By Anthony LoCicero, PE, LEED AP
Recruiting and retaining top engineering talent has never been more challenging. Construction is booming across many markets, leading to strong demand for engineering services. Yet the pool of engineering candidates remains limited across disciplines, including structural.
Retirements are on the rise. Students are choosing among a growing number of technical career pathways. To counteract a potential workforce shortfall, traditional recruitment and retention strategies, such as compensation, advancement opportunities, and work-life flexibility, are important. But often, it’s not enough.
The American Society of Civil Engineers last year partnered with the National Governors Association to identify strategies for counteracting engineering workforce challenges across public and private sectors. I advise my structural colleagues to familiarize themselves with the report’s short-term as well as long-term strategies. While all are important, for this column, I want to highlight one in particular: “Praising and promoting the technical achievements of infrastructure.”
The ASCE and NGA report makes the correct point that, “too often in engineering and public infrastructure, workers are scorned for public failures and only rarely praised publicly for their success.” As any structural engineer knows well, a successful structural design goes largely unnoticed until something fails. To better recruit and retain talent, the structural engineering field must do better at celebrating individual and collective contributions toward high-profile projects, while drawing connections between structural designs and a project’s social, environmental, and economic benefits.
It is not uncommon for structural engineering recruits to hear how a building’s designs are critically important to occupant safety. Our industry’s high standards of engineering excellence will always be driven by the need to maintain public safety. But when telling the story of the structural profession, safety may no longer be sufficient. New generations of engineers want to be involved in bringing about solutions for society’s most complex challenges: how to adapt to a warmer world, transition to promising new technologies, overcome growing economic disparities, etc. No matter our area of focus, we should all find some way to draw connections between our structural designs and these important challenges.
The following examples are just a few of the topic areas where structural design innovations will have far-lasting implications for social, environmental, and economic change.
Resilience. Extreme weather is becoming more frequent and costly. Climate change is anticipated to increase the intensity of heavy rain and hurricane events, while sea level rise is expected to amplify the impacts of storm surge. Flood risks are disproportionately expected to impact marginalized communities. In areas exposed to new risks, structural enhancements will become necessary to uphold the resilience of critical infrastructure. Tools may include new flood walls and other hardening measures. Depending on the application, these measures may be scaled to protect a single piece of equipment, a building, or for many city blocks.
Sustainability. A structure’s embodied carbon is an accounting of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with construction materials, including material production and installation. Embodied carbon is estimated to make up roughly 11 percent of energy-related carbon emissions worldwide. A growing number of jurisdictions now require life cycle assessments of a development’s embedded carbon, material-specific limits for carbon-intensive building materials such as concrete and steel, or declarations of a design package’s carbon footprint. Structural design teams are being called upon to calculate—and lower—the Embodied Carbon Order of Magnitude (ECOM) for a project’s structural materials.
Electrification. The electric vehicle (EV) transition is cleaning up tailpipe emissions at a time when transportation is becoming the largest contributor to climate change. Structural engineers play a major role in EV enablement. Electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) and on-site power generation technologies are being attached to building roofs through canopy configurations. Roofs will need to be strengthened or new pantograph systems created from scratch. Charging systems may also require thoughtful cable management approaches such as trench-based cable reels, overhead conductors, or mounted cables installed on mobile equipment.
Adaptive Conversions. With office vacancies reaching a 30-year high and land available for new construction often limited, developers are reimagining empty office buildings through adaptive reuse. Revitalizing these spaces can help revive downtown neighborhoods and alleviate housing shortages. Conversions have repurposed offices into apartments, high-tech laboratories, and educational facilities. In the process, structural design teams are removing walls to access natural light, strengthening floors to hold heavy research equipment, reducing vibrations to accommodate hyper-sensitive lab equipment, and supporting new mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.
If you ask ChatGPT, a structural engineer’s typical projects include the design of buildings, bridges, and utility structures. But what it means to be a structural engineer is changing. A broader definition is necessary to reflect the increasing complexity—and importance—of structural innovations. In doing so, we can elevate the profession and establish the field as one in which young professionals can pursue both their personal aspirations and technical interests. ■