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Have you ever seen that marketing
executive drive by in his Ferrari or that sales rep pass you at the
lights in his Porsche and wonder why
you only drive a 1990something Ford despite the fact that the
job you do probably
entails far more important work than what the sales rep or the
marketing exec does? Well wonder no more because today we take
a peak at the future for engineers and I can foretell the goodness.
The geek shall indeed inherit the earth.
I have come to this conclusion based on
several factors. For starters, computer nerds are now cool. Sure
this eventuated partly due
to the dot com bubble and a fair share of them becoming obscenely
rich nevertheless they now occupy more than their fair share of
status in our society and that
benefits us.
Computer nerds make up the tip of the iceberg, and us engineers make
up the bulk. Engineers provided the momentum to this beast and
will move in in a big way now that the nerds have opened the
door for us.
Engineers will step into tomorrow's
leadership roles because the future will
become a complex world with many factors to consider. An
engineering mind becomes the best to comprehend the whole picture and
steer us in the right direction. In today's day and age a country
can be run by someone who needs things spelt out phonetically
. No doubt backed up by a team of advisers. Todays
leaders can make mistakes, learn from them and then try again. We
can let that slip, no body can attain perfection. Tomorrows
world will not give us such chances however. It would benefit us to
have a 'phone a friend' or a 'fifty fifty' on such topics as how to
manage the environment, or how to deal with the looming energy
crisis when the worlds supplies of oil, gas and coal run out. Alas
we don't. Issues like this have a direct impact on our and our
children's lives and they
already have an impact on us. Decisions are required without
political baggage
interfering and I think most people would agree that engineers would
stand in the best position to do the job.
Knowledge
represents power, and the ability to generate and manipulate
that knowledge puts you in a better position still. The world has
become more and more virtual. Some of you may remember actually
talking to a bank teller. Some of you may remember times when the
majority of your mail did not arrive in electronic form and when
doing research for a project often meant going to the library. Ah,
the good old days. In those days you could differentiate people by
how much access they had to knowledge. Nowadays with the wonders of
the internet everyone has access to virtually all knowledge and the
game has changed. Now the differentiator becomes manageability and
engineers hold the prime position to do this.
Engineers become practical people.
They can pick up some gadget or gizmo and visualise it's potential. They can look at a problem
and run countless solutions in their mind. Only an engineer could
think up something like this. They can make
decisions that need making. An engineer can look at the glass and
tell you that half full does not describe it,, neither does half
empty, it represents, in fact, the wrong glass for the situation. The engineer would
then proceed to go get the right one.
The future will become more and more complex and faster and faster
paced and this suits engineers.
Just like reptiles used to rule the world with mammals coming in
somewhere beneath that, our environment
will change and a new breed of people will step up. We are
looking at the era of the engineer.
So get ready for a bright future. The
movers and shakers of tomorrow will
become us engineers and it will
become a time of great change for the better. In an attempt to increase clarity I
have endevoured to write the preceding article in e-prime. It was not
easy and if I have missed anything, by all means let me know.
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