entire matter again.

State your intentions and reasons so

that your manager can properly reconsider it.
Despite the responsibility to do exactly as instructed
or agreed, you will sometimes want to prove your
initiative by doing not only that, but also something
in addition thereto; perhaps the next logical action has
become clear; perhaps a promising alternative has come
to light. Doing these within reason will make your
drive and inventiveness immediately apparent.
The other side of this law is that you needn't be too
eager to embrace agreed-upon instructions. In general,
a program laid down by your manager, a department,
a project leader, or a design team is a proposal rather
than an edict. It is usually intended to serve only as a
guideline, one that will have been formulated without
benefit of the new information that will be discovered
during its execution. The rule therefore is to keep
others informed of what you have done, at reasonable
intervals, and ask for approval of any well-considered
and properly planned deviations.

REGARDING RELATIONS
}
{ WITH COLLEAGUES AND OUTSIDERS
Cultivate the habit ofseeking other peoples' opinions
and recommendations.
Particularly as a beginning engineer, you cannot
hope to know all you must about your field and your
employer's business. Therefore, you must ask for help
from others. This is particularly useful advice during a
confrontation of any sort; a good first question to ask is
"What do you recommend?" Your confronter will usu~
ally have thought about it more than you have, and this
will allow you to proceed to a productive discussion
and avoid a fight.
A warning about soliciting others' opinions deserves
mention. Condescending attitudes toward others and
their opinions are gratuitous and unwelcome. If you
have no intention oflistening to, properly considering,
and perhaps using someone's information or opinion,
don't ask for it. Your colleagues will not take long to
recognize such patronizing and to disdain you for it.
Promises, schedules, and estimates are necessary and
important instruments in a well-ordered business.
Many engineers try to dodge making commitments.
You must make promises based upon your best estimates for your part of the job, together with estimates
obtained from contributing departments for theirs.
No one should be allowed to avoid the issue by saying, "I can't give a promise because it depends upon so
many uncertain factors." Of course it does. You must
account for them, estimating best and worse cases, and
then provide neither laughably padded nor unrealisti46 mechanical engineering

I October 2010

cally optimistic schedules. Both extremes arc bad;

good engineers will set schedules that they can meet
by energetic effort at a pace commensurate with the
significance of the job.
A corollary to this law is that you have a right to insist
upon reasonable estimates from other departments. But
in accepting promises from other departments, m ake
sure that you are dealing with a properly qualified representative. Bear in mind that if you ignore or discount
other engineers' promises you dismiss their responsibility and incur the extra liability yourself Ideally, other
engineers' promises should be negotiable instruments in
compiling estimates.
Dorothy Kangas, a business process improvement specialist for The Nielsen Co., said that despite the many
tools and techniques available for managing a project,
sound estimating of resources and schedules is fundamentally important: " Getting reliable estimates is key
to creating and m aintaining a project schedule."
Kangas, who contributed to the Project Management
Institute's A Guide to the Project Management Body of
Knowledge, has seen both extremes: "Engineers or project team members sometimes provide estimates based
on the assumption that every task will be executed on
time; that nobody goes on vacation, nobody is sick, and
absolutely no other factors interfere with the scheduled activities. I've seen others try to pad every one
of their tasks. Suddenly what seemed to be a realistic
product development project will take twice as long
as expected." But Kangas noted this as well: "A good
project manager probably knows which engineers are
pessimistic and which are optimistic and tries to work
the middle!"
One area that is often overlooked in planning projects,
according to Kangas, is risk. "If there are uncertain
factors, or risks, those should be compiled and managed
according to their impact and likelihood of actually
occurring," she said.
Furthermore, according to Kangas, project risks and
project issues are two different things; risks can be
predicted and managed , w hereas issues arise unpredictably throughout a project. So risk management
activities should be scheduled into a project right from
the start, but issues must be squeezed onto the schedule
as they appear.
In dealing with customers and outsiders, remember
that you represent the company, ostensibly with full
responsibility and authority.
You may be only a few months out of college, but most
outsiders will regard you as a legal, financial , and technical agent of your company in all transactions, so be
careful of your commitments.

{ To Be Continued }

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growth of

par

By Jack Thornton
Will the power
industry need
engineers?

Certainly.

Will it hire
them as
before?

Probably not.

When will jobs

open up?

No comment.

Jack Thornton is a frequent contributor.

and is principal of MINDFEED
Marcomm in Santa Fe. N.M.

he convergence ofBaby Boomer

demographics, rising demand for
electricity, and the state of America's
electricity infrastructure are shaping up to create a major job market
in the United States for early-career
engmeers.
The convergence points to a need by the power industry to hire thousands of new engineers (and perhaps
hundreds of thousands of other workers) by 2030. Given the long time horizon, however, the ways in which
these career opportunities will work out for engineers
are marked by many questions. Although basic career
requirements can be summarized from discussions with
power-generation companies and industry associations,
no one is willing to predict when jobs will open up, or
w here the money will come from to finance the future
of electricity in the U.S .
America's electricity infrastructure appears in need of
a massive overhaul and rebuild. To accommodate an
ever-increasing demand for electricity and new smart
grid technology on the horizon, the electric utilities
foresee about $500 billion worth of projects running
through 2030 and beyond. Similarly large investment
numbers are cited for the nation's transmission and distribution grid that links generators, motors, computers,
light bulbs, and everything in between.
What's more, 45 percent of engineering jobs in the power-generation business "could become vacant" by 2013,
according to the Center for Energy Workforce Development. The projection is based on demographics-the
huge percentage of Baby Boom engineers now nearing
retirement age, plus normal attrition and staff turnover.
The center, a Washington, D .C. non-profit, was
founded in 2006 by the Edison Electric Institute, the
American Gas Association, other industry associations, and many utility companies across the country.
Launched when the utilities' demographic situation was
first recognized, the center's primary focus is education
and training for all power-generation job classifications,
including engineers.
The average utility worker is 48 years old, about five
years older than the median age for all U.S. workers.

According to Margaret M. Pego, chief human resources

officer and a senior vice president at Public Service
Enterprise Group in Newark, NJ., that puts her company and other energy providers in an uncomfortable
position. "The energy industry is one of the first to feel
the effect of Baby Boomer retirements," she said.
The utility industry got into this demographic bind
with deregulation in the 1980s. As power prices fell,
revenues dropped and margins shrank; tens of thousands of jobs were eliminated. Subsequent mergers,
downsizing, and hiring freezes pushed tens of thousands more out of the industry. Between 1990 and 1997,
for example, after most deregulation, employment in
"electricity services," which includes power-generation,
fell19 percent from 454,000 to 368,000, according to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Monthly Labor Review of
September 1999.
According to the Edison Electric Institute, there are
about 32,000 engineers of all types in fossil-fueled
power generation and in transmission and distribution.

r,, .-_. ' .

~

"

'

'

.-

'

0 w E:R 8 y
:

' l

. .... ...

Just to make up for expected retirements and attrition, about 15,000 engineers will need to be hired. If
and when the U.S. electricity infrastructure is rebuilt,
two to three times as many engineers may be needed.
The report, "Power Engineers and the Electric Utility
Industry," is a few years old, however. It was presented
to the National Science Foundation Workshop on Nov.
29, 2007, before Great Recession started.
M ary Miller, vice president of human resources with
the Edison Electric Institute, the industry association
for investor-owned utilities, pointed out that the high
percentage of industry workers reaching retirement
eligibility is not the only challenge. Coupled with those
retirement concerns, is the industry-wide expectation
that electricity demand nationally is expected to grow
in spite of the economic slowdown, she said.
When the recovery and expected expansion get under
way, "we will need electrical and power-systems and
nuclear engineers first," Pego said, "Then, as the power
systems area expands with more transmission lines, the
T H

tf NuMBERs . ".'
- ~

"

... ~

From
Just to make up for expected
retirements and attrition, about

through

15,000
(2@@7}

engineers will need to be hired.

electricity production
grew an average of

a year.

45%

of engineering jobs

in the power-generation business

'"could become vacant"" by

'-

:~
,~_

..

~ .,/ -"

The average

utility worker is

years old, about

years older

than the median age

for all U.S. workers .

2013 $500

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

BILLI0 N

:~;~;

worth of projects running

through 2030 and beyond

32.000

engineers of all types

in fossil-fueled powergeneration and in
transmission and
distributio n in 2007.

..

smart grid, and more generation sources, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, computer engineers, and
linemen will be added."
A spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute said, "All
our estimates of engineering openings are based on the
workforce development data ...We need electrical engineers and nuclear engineers and the skill sets thereof.
How many in each category, and where, really depends
on how the companies are focused when the retirements occur."
When will jobs open up? It's anybody's guess.
Where will the money for expansion come from?
Again, no easy answers. Estimates of capital needed
range well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Credit has tightened for everyone and utility credit ratings h ave slipped.
The recession has caused unprecedented back-to-back
drops in yearly U.S . electricity output. Output fell by
1 percent in 2008 and 3.7 percent last year, the steepest
drop since 1938. From 1998 through 2007, however,
electricity production grew an average of 1.4 p ercent
a year. The Department ofEnergy, in the Short-Term
Energy Outlook update for June from the Energy
Information Administration, has forecast a 3.1 percent
increase this year and another of0.9 percent for 2011.
T he back-to-backdrops hit utility revenues h ard. Hiring freezes followed, along with more layoffs, delays in
project starts, and outright cancellations. Many believe
cutbacks have not yet run their course. At the same
time the power- generation industry is restructuri ng as
companies seek to optimize their fle ets by fuel , to stress
operating efficiencies more than ever, and to seek a balance b etw een regulated and unregulated operations.

50 mechanical engineering

October 2010

WHOM THE UTILITIES SEEK

ggregate numbers such as 45 percent of a

workforce hide as much as they reveal. To
fill in the details , Mechanical Engineering
interviewed key people at representative
utility companies.
Despite the current cutbacks, hiring freezes, and
other uncertainties, " longer-term, the utility industry's
demand for mechanical engineers will stay strong,"
said Mark Gray, vice president for engineering services
and chief engineer for generation at American Electric
Power Corp. AEP, based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of
the largest U.S . generating companies. It operates 80
generating stations in the U.S with a total nameplate
capacity of 38,000 megawatts.
Gray has corporate responsibility for all engineering in
the company's generating plants. His team h as just over
300 engineers, technicians, designers, and administrative staff Of them, about 160 are graduate engineers,
and 85 to 90 are MEs. Individual power plants, he
noted, are staffed mostly with MEs and electrical engineers plus a growing number of chemical engineers.
A common question is whether today's senior engineers
will be replaced one for one as they retire. Gray says no,
not in numbers and not in tasks. "There is going to be
some reduction in staffing," he said, including reduced
workloads with standardization, automation, and newer
engineering technologies. (This was explored in an
article, "Positions of Power," in the January 2010 issue,
which is available online at www.memagazine.org.)
In the future an increasing number of engineers
"may not necessarily be AEP employees," Gray said.
"We will use m ore and more contract services su ch as