Back in the day…

There it was, one of the first internet communities, Usenet, about to undergo a sea-change unlike any it had seen before. It was 1993, September, a month that would never end.

It started much like the years had before; an influx of new people coming into the universities, getting online for the first time. The community absorbed them in much the same manner as they had in the past. These first-timers were indoctrinated with the well-established etiquette and protocols that were required to thrive in this brave new world.

It seems archaic now, but back then, in the “before times”, there was no way for mass discussion; social media had not yet been born.

The plot twist

And then it happened. AOL, then a name synonymous with the internet, decided to grant access to Usenet for all of its customers. Picture the mobs that gather outside department stores the morning after Thanksgiving: the unlocking of the door let loose a mass of people that overwhelmed the community. There were just not enough graceful souls able to help coach these new users in “civilized” net behavior. Social norms were thrashed; standards went out the window. It was the equivalent of the wild, wild west. In a word, it was chaos.

Future looking

Now think of how you on-board new designers or engineers. You show them who’s helpful and who to avoid. You show them around, pointing out places of interest, teach them company standards, design methodologies, workflow processes, etc. Over the coming decade (to be exact, 2014 through 2024), according to stats provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Architecture and Engineering field will grow an average of 3.4%, or about 710,000 jobs.

The biggest (projected) job gainers:

• Civil – 106,700
• Mechanical – 102,500
• Industrial – 72,800
• Electrical – 41,100

Couple this with the BLS projection of labor force participation over the same time period where we’ll see a 1:1.3 ratio of people leaving the work force to people entering. That will be a lot of churn, meaning a lot of people to on-board. The products will be ever more complicated, and the enabling technology will be as well. Technology is cited as one of the reasons the field isn’t growing as fast as other areas.  The productivity gains in PLM are making companies more efficient, even as the complexity grows.

Conclusion

Companies will need a strategy for managing changes in their employee base as well as the technology evolution. We offer a series of benchmarking and analysis services called PLM Analytics, and there is one specifically aimed at this issue called PLM Support. Let us know if we can help solve your Eternal September.