Planning a spectacular resignation? Be prepared to live with it.

The internet has a very, very long memory. We would all do well to remember that.

This last week has been shark week for the disgruntled employee. On Wednesday, mild mannered mid-level executive Greg Smith dropped a bomb on Goldman Sachs, when his resignation letter was printed as an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.

Just a day earlier, senior engineer James Whittaker posted a blog to Google’s intranet explaining the reasons behind his decision to quit the internet giant.

Greg Smith's resignation letter 
appeared in the New York Times

Both employees came off as genuinely concerned, likeable and – most importantly – never surrendered the moral high ground. Goldman Sachs, said Smith's letter, lacked integrity in its dealings with customers. Google, said Whitaker, had sold the company’s soul to advertisers and destroyed the culture of innovation. There were no insults, no personal finger pointing and no sarcastic tone. Both men will be criticized for going public, but both can defend their actions as necessary and ultimately dignified. 

Of course, not everyone takes this approach when it comes to resignation.

A personal favorite of mine will always be Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater who, after being pushed too far one too many times by an obnoxious passenger, grabbed a beer from the trolley, popped the lever of the emergency exit shoot and slid to freedom like a child in a play park – his resignation, called over his shoulder, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’

Joey DeFrancesco of Providence, Rhode Island can be found on YouTube resigning with the enthusiastic support of a brass band. Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Micro bowed out with a haiku via twitter (Financial crisis / Stalled too many customers / CEO no more.)

There are a lot of ways to quit a job. And the original approaches, while cathartic and enormous fun for your colleagues at the water cooler, will surely do the quitters little good in the long term. In the social media age, the things we do will stay with us, and recruiters are more and more thorough when it comes to web-vetting job applicants. Steven Slater’s CNN piece on YouTube has a quarter of a million hits. (As an employer would you really take the risk on it happening to you?)

Social Media has changed the culture 

of Spring Break

A report in the Times on the same day as Greg Smith's letter suggests that college students on spring break are becoming less wild and carefree. With cellphone cameras, Twitter and Facebook just a click away, party-goers are aware of what the consequences of their drunken antics might be.  They have simply changed their behavior. The same thinking should influence our workplaces. Anything you do could go viral at any minute, and there is no putting the toothpaste back in the YouTube. 

The end of employment is a natural part of the employment cycle, whether you quit or you’re let go. Hopefully most of the time it will be your decision, so when your time comes, remember that you’ll have to live with your actions for the rest of your career.

Even if your big statement doesn't attract national attention, you could easily develop a very unwelcome fifteen minutes of fame at an industry level. That will be enough to seriously affect your career prospects later on. 

It’s the women, stupid.

Last week’s blog elicited more responses than any other I’ve posted in the last six months. In hindsight, I suppose this shouldn’t have surprised me – after all, skill shortages are genuinely seen to be the biggest problem facing the engineering industry today. Most of the responses focused on just one of the reasons I laid out for the skills gap – women.

My favorite response was a one line e-mail, which I’ve used as this week’s title.

11% of engineers are women. 

After much thought and some vibrant discussion with some of the respondents, I’m ready to call it: The key to the global engineering skill crisis is women.

Statistics vary but let’s agree that the true proportion of women in engineering roles in the United States is 11%.

What would be the impact if everybody in the industry from top to bottom agreed to make every effort available to them to move this figure to 40% by the year 2030. That gives us 18 years to transform the fortunes of our weakened skill pool. One solution – with total focus – that would give the world the engineering skill and experience it needs.

This is a challenge I’m leveling at all of us, not just the college admissions guys, not just the corporate recruiters attending college job fairs (although they are both key to the objective.) I’m calling out everyone from the agency recruiters to the project managers. From the CEO of multinational E&C companies to the guy on the drawing board. You can solve the entire engineering skills crisis – we know how, we have the answer – what are we going to do about it?

We have some really obvious places to start: We have to encourage entrance to the industry from schools and colleges; we have to create awareness of a supportive environment that recognizes the need for flexibility and can provide it (how many other professions are there where it's completely normal to finish a project and take a few months off - then start something else when you're ready? Without losing a drop of career equity.); above all, we have to remove the perception that engineering projects are male dominated environments – when they really aren’t. The last major project I worked on was about 50% female in the main project office. Women were well represented as a whole, including the project lawyer and most of her team, the PR and HR department, finance, procurement and administration – just not engineering disciplines themselves.

This perception that it’s a boys club has to change. Only then can we grow the numbers we need. The money grabbing lawyers of the world have worked out how to accomplish this – they’re already at 40% - surely we can do it if they can?




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Case of disappearing engineers remains unsolved

Skill shortages are threatening America’s Engineering & Construction industries. We all acknowledge that the problem exists. You will find more people in this country who deny the existence of climate change than deny that America is desperately short of engineers. There is simply nobody on the other side of the argument.

Today the New York Times highlights a new and worrying aspect of the problem in a front page story (Where the jobs are, training may not be by Catherine Rampell.)

The future of the engineering workforce is seriously unclear.

Cuts in education spending resulting from economic woes are kicking us where we can least suffer the blow. The latest problem? Expensive technical classes are being cut before anything else at cash-strapped public colleges all over the country. Teaching technical subjects is expensive. Science, technology, healthcare and engineering require equipment and materials that you simply don’t need to teach Literature or Philosophy.  This is not a rant about arts and humanities programs and what they contribute to American industry – we need philosophers, we need journalists and yes Governor Perry – we need anthropologists.  We just don’t need them nearly as badly as we need engineers.

It’s probably valuable to explain why the engineering skill pool is in such a poor state of repair. There’s a number of reasons, but these are the top 5:

1.       Pull of the IT sector during the 80’s and 90’s.

The IT sector (electronics, programming and so on) sucked a huge number of technical minds away from civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. Those people are in their 40s now, and they represent the age group and level of experience that is scarcest in the industry today.

2.       Baby Boomers are bowing out

The huge generation born in the late 40s are retiring now. These are our senior people, the experienced engineers who might have hung around until their late sixties in order to fund their retirement. But these people prospered in the last three decades; they got rich on tax free assignments in the Middle East and high dollar contracts that lasted ten years instead of ten months and many have looked to retire early, cashing out at 60 on final salary pension schemes, their mortgages long since paid off.

3.        Women

Since the 1970s, every industry has seen massive rises in the percentage of female entrants. Not engineering and construction. 11% of engineers are women; you can dress the statistics up as much as you like – this is contemptible. (40% of lawyers becoming partners this year will be women; 33% of doctors are female; Chartered Accountants? – 41%). In the race for the hearts and minds of women choosing a profession, we are failing miserably.  

4.     Outsourcing undermining intake            

There’s a joke circulating our community at the moment. What’s the first thing you teach an undergraduate in Engineering 101? How to say Do you want fries with that? in Chinese. As young people watch technical jobs being outsourced, it’s difficult to sell them on the career choice. Whether their perception is accurate or not (it’s not) the fact is that the perception that engineering is not an outsource-proof choice of career is hurting us.

5.    Today’s issue – we’ve stopped teaching.

Today’s issue merits a place in the top 5. If we shut off the pipeline now by failing to make classes available to those who want to train, will that make things better or worse in the future? Enough said.

Nobody in the United States of America is working on a solution to the long term problem of technical skill shortages. Not the private sector, not education, not government – nobody. We need ideas – real ones – that can be applied now and sustained. Without this effort, from everyone in the industry, we’re going to continue our current slide.

Next week:

Part 2 - Solutions to the engineering skill crisis - what's on the table?








Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.