Managers built for leadership
By | smh.com.au | 03 February
A quick look at the executive management of most national and international companies will more than likely turn up an engineer.
And according to Professor Archie Johnston, the chairman for the Centre for Engineering Leadership and Management, the number of engineers in leadership positions during the next decade is going to increase.
"The world has changed and engineers have become a little more active and articulate in a proactive way in our contributions to leadership - not just in technical aspects but in policy as well," Johnston says.
It's this move into those less technical areas of management and leadership that the centre is pushing and why it has joined forces with Young Engineers Australia to hold the Engineering Leadership Conference 2010.
The centre holds conferences every two years to identify issues facing the profession and this year aims to show young engineers their leadership value in non-traditional areas.
"The focus is to articulate pathways for our leaders," Johnston says. "The country needs people to lead in all domains - not just in engineering companies - and many of today's young engineers will find they actually move into other enterprises.
"At this year's conference we will be bringing these young people together with leaders of business and industry.
"It's time now for the engineering profession to identify young and mid-career people and put in place successive planning.
"We want engineers to realise they can be leaders not just from a technical or mathematical perspective but also to move outside their comfort zone."
The conference, from May 5-7 in Brisbane, will look at the diverse range of career paths available for young engineers.
"We will be looking at leadership in business because engineering is really a subset of business and more engineers are actually moving into that domain, as well as in leadership roles in government," he says.
"Government is changing and we have to work with that to get a perspective from the inside - working with the environment and with the community. It is in these areas where engineers should really be taking the lead - climate change, carbon trading issues and working with a diverse range of groups.
"We often forget many graduates go through their careers and change direction. There are not too many engineers who start their career as an engineer and finish as an engineer. Like the rest of the community, engineers need to forge their careers and so far we have not developed educational patterns to support this. We need to give our graduates the chance for a second and third career and in the end they could be the ones that are leading the country."
For more information about the conference, see engineeringleadership.org.
First published by Smh.com.au on February 03 2010
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