The Workforce Reality Check Engineering Can’t Afford to Ignore

For years, engineering firm leaders have sensed the squeeze. It’s harder to find qualified candidates, longer searches to fill key positions, talented international interns who can’t stay. Now we have the data that quantifies exactly what’s happening and, more importantly, what it means for the future of our profession.

The ACEC Research Institute’s new study, The Workforce of the Future, delivers a reality check built on hard numbers: the U.S. engineering workforce faces a net shortage of approximately 18,000 engineers annually. That’s not a projection or a worst-case scenario. That’s the gap between the roughly 184,000 engineers who retired or left the field in 2022 and the 166,000 new graduates who entered it.

The arithmetic gets more concerning when you look at the pipeline. Engineering graduates peaked around 2019 at roughly 214,000 and have since declined by more than 10,000. In civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering (the core recruiting pool for most ACEC member firms) graduates are down more than 5,000 from that peak. Meanwhile, the college-age population shrank 3.3 percent between 2013 and 2022, and Baby Boomers continue retiring at scale.

The international student story reveals an especially painful contradiction: we train tens of thousands of qualified engineering graduates and then our visa system forces most of them to leave. Of the 40,606 international students who earned engineering degrees in 2022, only about 3,825—roughly nine percent—received H-1B visas. That’s 36,000 U.S.-educated engineers walking out the door because our immigration policy can’t keep pace with our economic needs.

But this study isn’t just about supply-side arithmetic. The Institute surveyed 2,097 engineering professionals and students and conducted 38 in-depth interviews to understand who’s entering the profession, what they expect, and where the disconnects lie. What we learned should shape how every firm thinks about talent strategy.

The incoming workforce is more diverse than the current one—43 percent of students are women compared to 36 percent of staff, and 35 percent of students identify as people of color versus 19 percent of staff. That’s encouraging, but it only translates into lasting change if firms build inclusive cultures that retain and advance diverse talent.

Young professionals bring different expectations. They want purpose-driven work, flexibility, and respect for boundaries. They’re drawn to engineering’s stability and impact, but 47 percent cite burnout risk as their top concern, and 43 percent feel pressure from billable-hour models that can crowd out learning and quality. These aren’t complaints—they’re signals about what sustainable engagement looks like for the workforce of 2035.

Perhaps most telling is the perception gap around adaptability. Students rate engineering as highly innovative and adaptable to change; executives see the industry as slow to modernize. If the reality students encounter doesn’t match the promise that attracted them, they’ll find industries that do.

The path forward isn’t mysterious: widen the pipeline through stronger internship programs and immigration reform, modernize operating models to balance productivity with development time, build succession systems that transfer knowledge systematically, and create cultures where diverse talent can thrive.

The workforce of the future is taking shape now. Firms that adapt will compete for talent successfully. Those that don’t will find the shortage isn’t just a statistic—it’s a constraint on growth, a brake on innovation, and a risk to long-term sustainability.

The full study is available here. The data is clear. The choice is yours.