The Future of The Consulting Engineer Industry through futures studies, Covid 19 lessons learned

Mahdi Razi Khosroshahi, Iran

President at Young Professional's Council of Iranian Society of Consulting Engineers, Market Development Manager at Rahab Consulting Engineers, Water Resources Management Engineering (M.Sc.), Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Soheil Alerasoul, Iran

Vice President at Iranian Society of Consulting Engineers, CEO at Rahab Consulting, Business Administration (PhD), American Liberty University, Structural Engineering (M.Sc.), Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Kaveh Heshmati, Iran

Member of FIDIC Future Leaders Committee (FLC), Structural Engineer at SANO Consulting Engineers,

PhD researcher in Structural Engineering, University of Bath, United Kingdom

Structural Engineering (M.Sc.), Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

In December 2019, a resident of Wuhan, China faced a mysterious illness which was the beginning of a global pandemic that has changed humans’ lives in most countries across the globe so far xxiii . After the global outbreak of the coronavirus, wise futurism in any profession seems necessary more than anytime. As components of deconstruction have altered powerful industries and human systems, it is vital to evaluate the situation in this regard. Moreover, modelling future conditions make it possible to achieve the desired scenario with ill-advised behaviours. In this paper, a general review is provided on the impact of a couple of unpredictable events and their subsequent impact on the economy. The future status of the consulting engineer's profession is discussed using the data related to future studies. The topic is evaluated through the case study which compares age pyramid and engineering graduates in Iran. In the first step; any systematic move, needs access to reliable statistics. Lack of reliable statistics is one of the existing shortcomings in any future studies not only in Iran but globally. To assess the future of engineering-related professions, there is a need to have access to important statistics across various different factors such as university graduates, labour market, and budget, microeconomic and macroeconomic policies. According to currently available observations in Iran, there is a huge gap between the labour market and the number of graduates that makes the future of engineering-related professions uncertain. Besides, the Covid-19 pandemic has threatened civil engineering projects drastically and make the situation worse than normal situation. As we have seen over the past few months, some sectors are disproportionately impacted compared to others such as tourism industry and restaurants, which in some cases are at the risk of extinction. Whereas, industries based on online ordering and communications have been less affected and in some cases have managed to grow during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, statistical review is necessary, and indeed, is the first step to consider the threats for consulting engineering industry.

Literature Review

Ritter and Pedersen (2020) in a study present a, five-step approach to analysing the impact of a crisis on a business model. Taleb (2007) xxiv , who proposed the “black swan theory”, focused on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events, and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events. Krishnamurthy (2020) xxv compared recent “black swan” events and emphasized the uniqueness of the current pandemic as discussed in Table 1. Table 1. Comparison of black swan events xxvi

9–11 Katrina Covid-19

Cause Nature of impact Scope of impact Impact on universities Infrastructure impact Loss of human life Time horizon Governmental response Secondary event

Long-term impact

Terrorism Episodic National Short-term disruption Suspension of all flights in the USA 2,996 Few months

Bailouts

None Anti-terrorism and homeland security infrastructure Nature Episodic Regional Regional impact Engineering of levees in the New Orleans area 1,839 Few months Regional emergency assistance None

Physical infrastructure emergency preparedness Medical Exponential Growth Global

Global impact Multi-state shutdown in US/lockdown in some countries 61,514 in USA, 228,000 worldwide (Google repository, 4/30) Potentially 1–2 years National stimulus bill

Mutations likely

Digital transformation Public health infrastructure transformation

It is worth mentioning another study which reported some of the many unusual consumer behaviour patterns that came to dominate in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kirk and Rifkin (2020) xxvii examined behaviours during three phases: reacting, coping and longer-term adaption, which discussed implications for marketing research and practice. McKibbin and Fernando (2020) xxviii explored seven different scenarios regarding how the Covid-19 might evolve in the upcoming year and examined the impacts of different scenarios on macroeconomic outcomes and financial markets in a global hybrid DSGE/CGE general equilibrium model. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a couple institutions, such as FIDIC, have also provided relevant guidelines xxix . of

Case Study: Engineering Graduates in Iran

According to the report of Statistical Centre of Iran xxx in the second half of 2019, the unemployment rate of the higher educated population was 17.4%. In 2018, this rate was about 18.6%, which means the average unemployment rate of the educated population is 1.64 times of the average unemployment in the country. The important issue is that in 2019, around 43.3% of the country's unemployment is related to university graduates. (Fig.1) Figure 1: Unemployment rate among academic disciplines (%) xxxi

30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00%

Civil & Architecture Eng. Art Biology Processing and manufacturing Information Technology The environment Welfare Studies Law Physics Social Sciences

In the past nine years, 36% of the university graduates in Iran are engineers which place the country

among the top five in the world. Figure: 2 xxxii

shows that there are about 240,000 engineering graduates per year in Iran which is above the numbers of Japan and close to that of the United States.

Figure 2: Number of graduates in engineering-related degrees, 2013 (×1000) xxxiii

As shown in Figure 3 below, where the horizontal bars related to the age group 20-24 and 25-29 are the largest, this shows that the largest group age of Iran’s population is within this demographic. It could concluded that the large portion of population is young and educated and it could potentially be a consequence of the sheer number of educated people, especially in engineering-related fields. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the situation, as companies including consulting engineering sector have had to make redundancies and have not been able to hire newly qualified young engineers.

Figure 3: Distribution of population in terms of age and gender

xxxiv

In recent months, consultancy and engineering firms have faced serious problems due to the recent crisis, since the Covid-19 pandemic unemployment is increasing and despite record graduate levels consulting firms are having difficulty hiring young engineers. So despite the rate of graduated engineers being significant (240,000 people per year) and some demand being present the two are not currently in equilibrium meaning that individuals with vital skills are unable to working in a sector that helps development and are instead looking elsewhere for work. As a result, development is not sustained, which causes a significant problems in the county. As such, there is a need to implement creative strategies to not only save their existing human resources but to also hire young engineers and take advantage of their knowledge and skills. The educational system is also required to establish new scenarios to balance the number of graduating people in engineering fields.