ESDU Captures Knowledge of Retiring Engineering Workforce

The alarms surrounding the imminent retirement of baby-boomer aerospace engineers are nothing new. But the question has hung stubbornly over the aerospace industry and now threatens to undermine its long-term strength and vitality. A recent article in the Seattle Times noted that of the half million plus engineers in aerospace in the U.S., a quarter are now eligible for retirement or soon will be.

At NASA, most of the engineers who worked on the Space Shuttle Program have retired, leaving the new Aries Program to mostly younger engineers who haven’t worked on manned spacecraft before. Boeing expects to see 20% of its engineers retire now or in the very near future. Though these examples are for the industry in the United States, the problem spreads worldwide.

This kind of brain drain would be disastrous in any case, but for aerospace and defense, it is worsened by compounding factors. The trend continues of fewer and fewer American students showing an interest in science and engineering, making shallow the pool of new graduates from which U.S. aerospace companies can draw. Students who are citizens of other countries earned more than half of the advanced engineering degrees awarded in the United States in 2005, and as that number has grown, so have the numbers of those foreign-born students who take their knowledge home to their country of birth. Other industries can make up for shortages in the workforce by recruiting from different countries, but aerospace and defense are severely and necessarily restricted in their ability to draw from other nations by technology transfer and security concerns.

Andrew Brown is Development Director of ESDU, an international firm based in the United Kingdom that offers validated engineering design data, methods, and software. Hereports that within industry there is great concern that some students are capable of using engineering software, but they don't understand the first principles of the discipline. "Any organization," says Brown, "can teach in a four-day course how to use a piece of software, but they can't teach the fundamentals of engineering and physics." The software packages are, he says, "simply an aid to solving the problem. If you don't understand the underlying problem and the physics and engineering of that problem, you can never get to the right solution."

ESDU has long been active in preserving lessons learned and making them available to the next generation of engineers. Its effort is to "capture the knowledge that would otherwise be locked in the heads of senior engineers who are retiring," Brown says, so that it can be passed on to junior engineers and others who need access to reliable, validated best practices. For that reason, ESDU has long been active in the European academic market, 9 and the company is now becoming more active in the academic world in the U.S., giving deep discounts to universities to teach students with real-world tools, to help bridge the divide between school and work.

ESDU, an IHS company, offers collections of best-practice design guides. These guides are produced by committees of experts drawn from industry. The company has more 250 independent committee members who work at such organizations as Boeing, NASA, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and the FAA. Subject-specific committees use both published sources and unpublished data to formulate industry best-practice guides. After approval and validation by the technical committees, the guides go through several iterations until they get unanimous approval from the worldwide industrial committee and are then issued.

ESDU maintains an online knowledge database that is available to subscribers. As a part of its service, it also offers The ESDU Engineering Service, which allows engineers to directly contact at any time ESDU engineers to get guidance and support via e-mail or telephone.

In these ways, ESDU hopes to conserve the accumulated knowledge and ideas of the retiring generation of aerospace engineers. As the company expands its role, it plans to issue more than 100 best-practice guides per year, to increase its contingent of committee members to achieve an even greater depth of knowledge and design insight, and to offer that wealth of information to academia and industry.

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