Leadership Message What makes Boeing great People are Boeing’s future and it’s critical to keep the talent pipeline flowing The future is bright for Boeing. We have great products, “Our people are our future.great customers and huge market opportunities. Our peoplecreate those products, serve those customers and enable us to capture and sustain major portions of our markets. In other It is time to challenge them words, our people make this company and its products great. When talking with employees around the company, I am often and allow them to grow into asked what I foresee as potentially limiting Boeing’s ability to prosper. That answer also has to do with people … and whether the leaders of tomorrow.” Boeing can continue in the future to develop, build and support the innovative products that safely serve millions every day, protect – Mike Delaney freedom, and drive commerce and economies around the world. Vice president of Engineering, Boeing Commercial Airplanes We need to ensure we have the talent to compete in the future. PHOTO: ED TURNER/BOEING Ironically, Boeing will soon find itself in a period of almost unparalleled opportunity for its employees, coupled with an equal technical employees by supporting Science, Technology, Engineering amount of risk. Let me explain. and Math—STEM programs—in school districts where Boeing has We have a large population of employees nearing the end of their large populations of employees. careers, with decades of know-how, and a smaller but expanding We also are tapping surplus engineering talent from Boeing de- population with just one to five years of experience. Between is a fense programs affected by shrinking defense budgets, and recruiting deep valley; knowledge and experience are not equally distributed the best, brightest, most capable people from engineering schools across the workforce. This is important, as the leaders of tomorrow— across the United States and internationally. Once they join us, key those who will drive development of the next great products—typi- initiatives such as the Ed Wells Partnership—administered jointly by cally emerge from the population between early-career employees Boeing and the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in and the more experienced. But that population is small. Aerospace—help develop these employees’ skills and careers. For example, 22 percent of the Commercial Airplanes engineer- Other efforts involve a number of methods to transfer knowl- ing workforce is eligible to retire. In five years, another 25 percent edge from our experienced employees to early-career employees will become retirement eligible. While we don’t expect everyone including training, mentoring, knowledge capture and leveraging to leave the company at the same time, once we hit this five-year the learning of our subject-matter experts and Technical Fellows. window we could lose 1,000 to 1,500 of our most experienced Even the way we identify candidates for manager and executive people in engineering every year. That’s 25,000 to 37,500 collective leadership positions likely will change. Given the demographics years of experience leaving annually. I described, we need to promote people into management and Unless we retain people or find ways to pass along what they executive roles earlier in their careers than ever before. This will know, we will lose that knowledge forever. The demographics are present great opportunity for many. comparable across many parts of the company and across the Boeing has a proud, long, pioneering history in aerospace. aerospace industry in general. Our colleagues before us bequeathed us the responsibility to carry Commercial Airplanes is working on a variety of talent-management on the tradition of building industry-leading products—products initiatives as part of our corporate Engineering Excellence effort— that change the world. It is our turn to do the same. our strategy for achieving technical excellence while delivering Our people are our future. It is time to challenge them and allow business results. Efforts include developing the pipeline of future them to grow into the leaders of tomorrow. n BOEING FRONTIERS / AUGUST 2012 7
Frontiers August 2012 Issue
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