The Class of 2031 Is Already Here
41% of AEC workers will retire by 2031. That number is not a forecast buried in a think-tank report. It is the lived reality of most firm leaders watching senior engineers count down to retirement while the pipeline behind them thins.
The conversation in most firms is about recruiting. How do we fill the seats? But the harder question is the one almost nobody is asking: are we even ready to evaluate who replaces them? Not their technical skills. Their judgment. Their ability to see what the data does not show. The instinct that comes from twenty years of watching things fail.
That is not a LinkedIn job post. That is a leadership development conversation that should have started five years ago.
The Missing Middle Is Not a Talent Shortage
It is leadership debt.
The AEC industry hollowed out its middle layer during the last two downturns. The people who should be stepping into principal and regional leadership roles right now were the ones who left during 2009 and 2020, or who never got developed because there was no time, no budget, no structure for it.
Who mentors the Class of 2031 when the middle layer is hollow? Senior leaders are too stretched. Junior staff are too green. The firms that recognized this gap three years ago and invested in structured mentoring, leadership cohorts, and intentional knowledge transfer are the ones who will own the next decade. The rest will spend it recruiting.
The Dinner Table Question I Cannot Answer Yet
My son is approaching college. I have a PhD and an EMBA. And I do not know what to tell him.
Not because I lack opinions. Because the honest answer is that the world he is entering looks nothing like the one I prepared for. The skills that built my career, deep technical expertise combined with business acumen, are still valuable. But the way they are acquired, deployed, and rewarded is shifting faster than any curriculum can keep up with.
Anyone with teenagers knows this is a monologue. They already have it all figured out, right? But the question lingers: what do you tell the next generation when the playbook you followed is being rewritten in real time?
AI Super-User: Q1 Check-In
Tried: Voice dictation. AI agents that prompt and draft for me. Building workflows where the AI handles the first pass and I bring the judgment.
Surprised by: How powerful Co-Work is. How scary the access feels. The gap between what AI can do and what most people think it can do is wider than I expected, in both directions.
Still figuring out: Whether to take the leap. Not into using AI. Into trusting it enough to change how I spend my time. The tool is ready. The question is whether I am.