Question: What do you think is going to become the biggest challenge for engineers in the future?

Neil Dhir answered on 18 Jun 2014:

I think perhaps the education of engineers will become much more difficult in the future. We are in a weird place right now where we are just able to produce what one would call general engineers, someone who can just join a company and pick up the ropes when they get there.

This will be harder in the future.

As we have grasped many of the more fundamental basics of the world around us, things are now becoming more complex, and to tackle this we need more complex education to deal with the latter. This will have an impact on engineering education, where we no longer will be able to train general engineers. They will have to be specialised from day one, rather choosing their specialty later on in their degree, or indeed after their degree.

Shoring up all the necessary expertise needed for future engineers will be hard. Companies will most likely have a lot of say. Think for example about energy engineers, in the future they are most likely to be fusion engineers or atomic engineers, to gain the focus and expertise they need to succeed in those fields. We have chemical engineers today, that serve primarily the oil and offshore sector, but in the future they may well have to be fracking engineers or deepsea engineers, in order to efficiently deal with those parts of the business.

Hence, I reckon that while we are alright now in regards to training engineers, this will be harder in the future, especially as companies and governments are looking for cost savings, they will also be demanding more from their core value which often happens to be the technical staff i.e. the engineers and scientists.