Why Young Engineers Don't Want to Work in Excel

Why Young Engineers Don't Want to Work in Excel

Every engineering company talks about attracting young talent. But don’t think as much about what that means when they arrive.

A graduate walks into their first job expecting to solve problems, learn from experienced engineers and design buildings. Instead, they spend half their day copying numbers between spreadsheets, filling out templates and trying not to break an Excel file that nobody really understands.

After a while, they start wondering if this is what most of structural engineering is. The problem isn't that graduates don't want to work hard. They do. They're excited to learn and keen to contribute. But there's a big difference between learning engineering and learning how to navigate twenty different spreadsheets. We've somehow accepted that Excel is a massive part of becoming an engineer when it shouldn’t be.

Most graduates were in University only one or two years prior, where software that updates in real time and works across devices was the norm. They can ask AI to explain complex concepts, write code or analyse data in seconds.

Then they start work and are handed a spreadsheet that was created in 2012, has sixteen hidden tabs and comes with a warning to not change the spreadsheets. That's not learning, it’s added stress. Engineering is understanding how a structure behaves. It's making decisions, weighing up options and doing calculations to optimise safety efficiency in building design.

Copying values from one spreadsheet into another isn't engineering. Neither is manually updating the same information in three different places because the software doesn't talk to itself. Every hour spent doing repetitive admin is an hour not spent learning from senior engineers, which is where graduates really develop. Good engineers are produced by asking questions, reviewing designs, understanding failures and seeing how experienced engineers think through a problem. The more repetition we can remove, the more time there is for the work that matters.

The best graduates don't leave engineering because the work is too difficult. They leave because too much of their day doesn't feel like engineering at all. As an industry, we spend a lot of time asking how to attract the next generation but not how to keep them.

If we're serious about keeping great engineers, modernising our tools should be top priority. 

By Mary Crowe