Here's how you become an engineer they can't afford to lose

There’s a story going around that there aren’t enough engineers. You’ve probably heard it. Then you talk to someone who’s been sending out applications for months with nothing coming back, and they’ll tell you it’s the opposite.

The companies doing the hiring were never short on people. They’re short on people who can do the work. That’s where all of this comes from, so I’ll keep the problem short and put the time into what helps you.

What’s going on

There are more machines on factory floors than ever. Over half a million new industrial robots went into service in 2024 alone, and the number climbs every year. Every one of them needs someone to program it, wire it, get it running, and keep it running.

Start with the layoffs

Layoffs come around every so often, and the fear of them shapes how a lot of people act at work. So look at who actually goes when they happen.

First out the door are usually the newest and the easiest to replace. The ones who stay are the ones the company can’t afford to lose. Most of the time that’s the people who’ve been there longest. They also tend to know the most.

Look at what’s actually protecting them. It’s the knowledge, not the years. The years are just how it usually shows up. That’s the good news: you don’t have to put in twenty of them to get out of the firing line. You have to get the knowledge those twenty years would have given you.

Sit with the people who know

That knowledge is a few feet away from you, sitting in the people who already have it.

When you’re new, the easy thing is to stick with people your own age. Same generation, same jokes, more comfortable. But the ones worth your time are the ones who’ve watched things break and behave in ways you haven’t seen yet, who can look at a problem and tell you what it probably is before you’ve finished describing it. Most of the time they’re older than you. Spend your time there. Ask the questions that make you look a little stupid. I read once that the only thing separating successful people from everyone else is that they’re comfortable putting themselves in positions where they look like the lesser man, sometimes the stupid one. That’s the whole shortcut, and hardly anyone takes it, because it’s a little uncomfortable.

The four levels

It helps to be honest about where you stand, so here’s how I split it. There are four levels, give or take, and each one has a single thing that sets it apart from the one below.

Instructed. You do what you’re told, step by step, and someone checks it afterward. When something’s wrong, they catch it. Everyone starts here.

Reliable. You can run the familiar job on your own, start to finish, and trust that it holds. The limit shows up the day the cabinet doesn’t match the drawing. Then you stop and wait for someone who knows. You can be handed the known work, as long as it stays known.

Diagnostic. When the job stops matching the paperwork, you keep going. You work out why, reasoning from how the system behaves instead of what the drawing says it should do. This is where you get hard to replace.

Owner. There’s no clean answer anywhere, and the call is yours to make and to stand behind. You’re the one who says whether something’s safe to run, and you carry what comes after. Very few people sit here, which is why they’re worth what they are.

The first two are the part of the job being automated, and the first to go when things tighten.

How you move up

You get to the next level by reaching for the work just above where you are, next to someone who knows enough to catch you if it goes sideways. That’s the whole method. You put yourself a little out of your depth on purpose, on real work, with someone who can pull you back. And sometimes you’ll get thrown a long way out of it. Learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Step out of your comfort zone and you get uncomfortable. Nobody wants to stay uncomfortable, so they go back. That’s the problem with taking work above your level. It’s emotionally hard, because you’re doing something you’re not capable of yet. But that’s the whole point. Don’t do it and you’ll never reach level three or four.

I’ll use my own case. I’m 21, and as of writing this, about two years in. I’m not writing this from the top looking down.

My first months were the routine part: HMI screens, drawing revisions, the filler work you hand the new person. The parts that taught me something were the ones with no clean answer to look up.

The first machine I commissioned mostly on my own ran a program written before I was born. The I/O checks and the safety fault-finding were mine to reason through, with only the system in front of me to go on. Another time a light curtain locked itself into a state none of my documentation described, and getting it running again meant working out why the safety logic behaved that way instead of guessing at buttons.

Most of a day at a desk disappears into small stuff: email, the easy tickets, the tasks that feel like progress because you can actually finish them. Brian Tracy calls the hard, important task the frog, the one you’ll put off all day if you let yourself. His rule is simple. Eat it first, before anything else gets its hands on your morning. It works because a couple of tasks carry most of the value of your day, and those are almost always the ones you’re avoiding. He warns about the other trap too: doing something very well that never needed doing at all, busywork dressed up as effort. Clear the frog early and the rest tends to fall into place.

So go and do the stuff that you know is going to be difficult, before anything else!

What it gets you

Get yourself to that part of the job and three things change.

Getting hired. The companies doing the hiring can’t find people who can do the hard part. Become one of them and you stop competing in the crowded stack of applications. You turn into the person they’ve been looking for and couldn’t find.

What you’re paid. You’re paid for the size of the problem you can solve, not the hours you sit at a desk. The further up you are, the fewer people can do what you do, and the more it’s worth keeping you doing it.

Layoffs. You’re the last one they’d let go, because letting you go costs them the one thing they can’t quickly replace. The fear that runs a lot of working lives mostly stops applying to you.

Start building it

Stand next to the people who know. Reach for the work that’s a little beyond you. Stop waiting for it to come to you. As my boss told me once, “nothing will come for free”.

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