ECL’s recent Beyond Disruption summit featured an exploration of the disruptions being experienced by the engineering community, the impact of these disruptions, and the responses needed from the engineering community. This “Voices from ECL” series will feature interviews with several of the attendees at the summit.
Part 2
Melyssa Hartzell is a Principal at Martin/Martin Inc. in Lakewood, CO and has participated in several ECL summits. Melyssa highlighted…
- Talent and workforce challenges in the engineering community that are creating competition for candidates and an accelerated career path that sometimes sacrifices knowledge transfer between generations.
- Positive aspects of disruption, particularly the opportunity for the engineering community to shift to a leadership role on important issues such as policy and funding.
- ECL’s approach that fosters broad, system-wide thinking as opposed to the normal project focus of day-to-day work.
The full interview with Melyssa is available at this link.
Part 1
Jerry Buckwalter was formerly the Chief Innovation Officer at ASCE and now serves as International Director of Innovation for the Atlas Initiative for Resilient Infrastructure. Highlights from Jerry’s thoughts included…
- AI as a key disruptor.
- Lack of agility in the engineering community that hampers our ability to deal with change.
- Need for engineers to “broaden their aperture” as problem solvers.
- Stepping up to our traditional role as stewards of technology with new technologies like AI.
- Recognizing the leadership opportunity to tackle bigger issues where our voice has been missing.
- Learning to communicate in different ways, incorporating “story telling.”
Jerry also highlighted how ECL’s approach to the future of engineering offers a different thought process, one that is focused on questioning whether the things we have always done are the right thing or can be done in a different way.
