Has the pandemic changed engineering?

I’m hopeful that COVID will and has taught us all to think outside of the box. I’m hopeful that colleges and companies will find more innovative ways to allow and encourage students to obtain opportunities for experience in engineering. The one thing that all colleges should do is maintain their careers services regardless of COVID’s impact. This is one avenue students can use to apply for internships, co-ops, and/or to start their career upon graduating. There are web-based career services like Indeed that also provide access to companies that have openings for college students seeking experience in their field of study. Be open to opportunities away from home, most companies will provide living expenses while co-oping with them and/or relocation for new hires. Seek out the companies that interest you, opportunities don’t always have to be through a particular program but directly with a company.

I majored in Electrical Engineering, while in school I studied power and communications and interned with a local telecommunications company. I have close friends that are Chemical Engineers, they also interned and now work for some of the leading makers of household products and the manufacturing of medicine. I say this to say, dig a little deeper, you’d be surprised at how many engineering careers are out there to experience and how many companies need engineers. When deciding my field of study I changed my mind at the last minute because I was told women only study a certain area of engineering more men are Electrical Engineers. If I had known then the multitude of options I had as an engineer, I probably would have chosen differently but most importantly I am an Engineer! Remember, you are becoming an ENGINEER, don’t put limitations or let people put limitations on what you can do as an Engineer and with an Engineering Degree.

Lastly, I feel the pandemic has shown the world that there are so many aspects of engineering, from communications to the entertainment industry; from the medical field to the products we use that now have been deemed necessary for survival. I have seen a positive impact that COVID has had on my company and on technology as a whole. Every few years we have had some type of natural disaster that has impacted my company tremendously but this one has allowed us to really see the importance of how we communicate and the ways we communicate to each other. Although enhancements to our network are good and innovative, providing accessibility has been the greatest accomplishment, so that no one is left out or left behind. People/ The World needs to be able to communicate regardless of their physical location and financial situation. It has put a lot of demand on the company as a whole but in a positive way that has made us all feel that we’ve truly made a difference. We’ve become more flexible, learning to balance work and family while still accomplishing our goals. We’ve become more sensitive as a company to how the pandemic has impacted the world and what part we play in ensuring we all are connected. I hope this continues as a way of life for my company and doesn’t happen only as a result of a devastating event.

Be Encouraged and Stay Empowered!

Experience can come in many forms and engineers are great innovators. With the evolution that COVID has spurred, I would advise students to search the internet often for experience opportunities. Businesses with engineering related opportunities are still going to have mentorships and experience opportunities they may just not be in a traditional manner.

Get together with like-minded students and try to solve real world problems due to the pandemic. There are several technologies which are thriving in this environment. Delivery service, remote communication tools and yet there are many still suffering. Education struggles to engage some students in this remote or hybrid learning environment. Technology cannot accommodate some of the rural communities. Science and early detection of potentially dangerous pathogens on planes, ships, and close proximity environments is needed. Explore, grow, experiment!

Personally only the location of my job changed due to the COVID pandemic. Instead of going into an office, I am at home. Instead of someone popping around to my desk with a question, it is a phone call or web based conference session. The challenge has been integrating new personnel into this isolated work model. Training and system access can be a challenge for a new person to understand let alone try to describe or demonstrate in a sharing application. Yet it has also given some individuals more confidence in their abilities and they are engineering more independently.

Some engineering-related classes and/or programs may have been cancelled, and even discontinued, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I believe the overall focus remains the same, going into the future. Companies have realized that they can drive results and create innovation/change by supporting and including diverse thinking. At Verizon, the company is still very much supportive of inspiring female students to study engineering and participate in opportunities (internships, jobs, etc) in the various STEM fields. If a program you are interested in is not returning because of the pandemic, I would encourage you to talk with an engineering instructor you know, or any other mentors or folks who have guided you thus far, and ask them to help you find other (similar) opportunities. Since the pandemic, I feel my job has an even greater significance. We build the networks that support all the services people have really needed while studying or working at home during the pandemic – namely, the internet! We have been very busy keeping an eye on the capacity needed by our customers, and determining how to effectively build our network to meet those needs.

The pandemic has certainly changed engineering and the world, in terms of how we will do business moving forward. While not all the details are known yet, the one thing is that it will be different. However, engineering design and development does involve a lot of hands-on activities, from prototyping to testing to manufacturing. Many of these tasks have continued during the pandemic, but it has not been in the media so people are not aware. Think about how much of engineering is essential for the world to have continued during the pandemic: internet, wireless providers, utilities, defense, infrastructure, etc. Of all the colleges at the universities, the colleges of engineering know students have to be in the labs to learn, and have made sure the university administration is aware. I believe, in terms of programs that were removed due to the pandemic, they will be reinstated when it is deemed safe to do so, this will be a "blip." Will the programs return be the same? Some will, some won't. It will be interesting to rethink how we have done things and look for better ways, rather than continue in the same manner. From that perspective it is a great opportunity to improve things. Engineering companies NEED new engineers, so the demand will certainly be there, so the 'system' will have to find a way to fill this demand. In fact, I have seen a number of engineers that were eligible to retire, go ahead and retire, so there might even be a time period of even HIGHER demand to replace these retirements. The programs WILL return in one form or another, so real work experience will be available. We all understand this is atypical and companies will adjust for this. If not they will fail, IMHO.

How has my job changed? It certainly takes longer to do things over the phone than to meet in person, at times. I have travelled less and had more phone meetings. Some of my colleagues have had to travel just as much. We are not allowed to have video cameras at my work due to security, so it has been phone meetings and sharing screens. It can make it difficult to make personal connections, but we have learned to do the best we can.

The pandemic has certainly changed many ways of doing business. Some companies were able to pivot to working from home (using collaboration tools such as Webex, Blue Jeans, Google Drive, or Zoom) and others needed to get creative with ways to continue serving customers or doing business in person. That's true for students as well. There are conversations and mentoring opportunities that can happen easily virtually while others require face to face interaction with the appropriate social distancing and masks. Additionally, as more people get the vaccine, more places of business will return to more in person activities.

At Verizon we've embraced a hybrid approach where employees who serve customers (field engineers, construction personnel, representatives in the stores, etc.) have been back at the "office" for many months now. They've discovered creative ways to troubleshoot with customers with things like Facetime or serving customers on the sidewalk and limiting the number of people in the stores. Other departments (like mine) still have all employees working from home and utilizing the collaboration tools. We've found that we've been just as productive in this environment as we were when working in the office. We've also been able to continue our internship program virtually in both 2020 and 2021, so students should continue to seek those types of opportunities.

My job as an engineer has not changed because of the pandemic; however, the efforts that I need to put in to foster collaboration have become much more intentional. Pre-pandemic, it was easy to grab a group of people, meet up for a meal or a coffee break, and discuss whatever topic was relevant at the time. I found that in these informal sessions I was learning a LOT and gaining new perspectives that I had not thought about before. Maybe I was trying to solve a problem in Python when in reality there is an easy way to do it in Alteryx, for example. In a virtual environment, I am forcing myself and my team members to set up time where we join a video call and brainstorm different topics. Carving out this time has become essential to making sure that we continue to innovate and learn new things. Even before the pandemic, we as a society were moving towards an even more technology oriented culture. Everything is online, everything is connected, and we need to make sure we engineer future systems and technologies to care for that.

Rather than eliminating engineering opportunities in the long term, I think that pandemic is in fact causing people to think outside the box and find new ways of using their engineering skills to help people. I am a professor in an engineering school and several of my colleagues who have 3-D printers that they use in their engineering research projects repurposed them to step up to the critical need for personal protective equipment which were widely distributed to local hospitals and other front-line workers. Once COVID was understood to be transmitted primarily by aerosols, another of my colleagues who is a chemical engineer developed a material that cuts down by about 70% the amount of aerosols produced in the mouth. He then embedded it into a small square of chocolate and they are investigating the use of this for passengers on airplanes or trains to make transportation safer.

I also think that with the new administration's emphasis on environmental issues and infrastructure, there will be more and more need for trained engineers. While the workplace of the future may change, I do not think that engineers will be any less valuable or needed.

The pandemic forced many companies to move to a virtual work environment. My engineering company (like others) found that the virtual environment actually increased collaboration between our engineering work-force and productivity in development while allowing employees to better balance work and family demands. The key for engineers to adopt this new work environment is to develop the skills to work with “Digital Mentors” as a “Digital Team” and build “Digital leadership” skills. The pandemic has taught us that Digital Leadership and Digital Teamwork is now a critical engineering skill for all of us to learn in the fast-moving and constantly changing economy driven by societal and technology changes in the post-pandemic world.