OF EMERGING AND PROFESSIONAL BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN EMERGING AND EXPERIENCED PROFESSIONALS

Holly Callahan

In the Emerging Professionals group, we often focus on bridging the gap between emerging professionals (roughly those people with 0 to 10 years of experience) and experienced professionals (people with 10+ years of experience). More often the seasoned professionals we collaborate with in Lunch-and-Learns and webinars have 20 or more years of experience and are nearing retirement. While this experience level brings an unmatched level of knowledge, the lack of mid-level professionals with maybe 10 to 15 years of experience is noticeable. Now there are an endless number of potential reasons for this. Mid-level professionals are likely to be in a busy time of the careers and personal lives as this is often when people are raising young children and navigating new roles both at home and at work. However, it seems like midlevel engineers aren’t just few and far between in the Emerging Professionals space, they are also hard to find for open employment positions. Managers have noted they are having trouble filling mid-level positions, especially with high retirement rates, and the need to continuously back-fill positions.

While age isn’t a perfect proxy for professional experience (and engineers are welcome to join the profession at any age) analyzing age trends of civil engineers can shed some light of the perceived and apparent “gap” in this profession. DataUSA provides a breakdown of civil engineers by age from 2014 to 2020. As shown in Figure 1, the share of younger engineers in the 25–30-year age range has increased steadily since 2014, and the share of mid-aged engineers in the 37–55-year range has declined. Interestingly, the 55- to 60-year range has also seen an increased share in the workforce over this time period.

The trends are even more evident when 2014 and 2020 are isolated in Figure 2

Figure 2. Engineers by age in 2014 and 2020

One can ask the question: Why is there a drop in the share of 37- to 55-year-old workers? One possibility is folks in this age range made the transition to the technology sector. Employment rates in the tech sector have varied throughout the 2000s. The peak of the “dot-com boom” or “tech bubble” occurred in the year 2000, with employment rates at their lowest in the industry after its burst in 2004. After this burst, coupled with lower employment opportunities during the 2007 to 2009 recession, the tech industry boomed again with job growth expanding 20.3 percent from 2010 to 2015 (compared to only 11.1 percent in the rest of the private sector). Importantly, wages in the technology sector increased approximately 5 percent each year from 2010 to 2015, resulting in average weekly wages that are at least double the wages in the private sector1. People who are 37 to 55 years old in 2020 would have been 17 to 35 years old in 2000 and 27 to 45 years old in 2010. While potentially providing less stability than a career in Civil Engineering, making twice the amount in wages and using similar skill sets could have been enough to pull people into the tech sector and away from Civil Engineering or encourage young college students to pursue computer science over engineering.

1 Charles S. Gascon and Evan Karson. 2017. “Growth in Tech Sector Returns to Glory Days of the 1990s.” Regional Economist. July 25. Accessed at https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/secondquarter-2017/growth-in-tech-sector-returns-to-glory-days-of-the-1990s on March 30, 2023.

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