Nothing is too hard for an engineer!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the Deutscher Ingenieurtag 2023 (#DIT2023) in Berlin. For many of the complex social, economic and ecological problems, we hope for technological solutions. Climate change is the best example: we humans will not change our behavior to the extent that would be necessary. We have become far too comfortable for that and have gotten used to a certain standard of living. That is why the engineering profession is particularly important. We are the ones who have to develop the necessary technologies – in interplay with a variety of other disciplines.

That brings me to my key takeaway from this exciting day: collaboration. For far too long, our profession has been divided into individual specialist disciplines. For far too long, products have been viewed and developed just as separately. The decisive future quality of the engineers of tomorrow will be thinking and working in networks. In an increasingly connected world, it is important that we engineers work in just as connected a way and, above all, design technology accordingly.

In addition, we engineers increasingly have the task of making technology more accessible. For too long we have prided ourselves on being the only ones who understand the real depth of technologies. So that future technical progress is available to as many people as possible and all levels of society can benefit from it, it is up to us engineers to democratize technology. Examples like ChatGPT show it impressively: for a long time, AI was mainly reserved for scientists and was perceived as very abstract. Suddenly it becomes more approachable, and right away many more people can benefit from it and develop great new ideas.

I liked the welcome address by the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger. She highlighted the importance of the engineering profession in tackling the technological challenges ahead. It was also particularly important to her to emphasize that it must be the task of politics to ensure that research and development in Germany remain attractive.

I was able to record another podcast episode myself. This time I talked about my trip to Silicon Valley. By the way, you can listen to the whole episode here.

Another personal highlight for me was the panel discussion in the late afternoon. Together with representatives from education, politics and business, I got to discuss what it takes to increase value creation in Germany. Technology is a vehicle for this, but very often technology is not the problem – existing structures and thought patterns are. Telling for me, once again, was the fact that all companies claimed to be innovative and attractive to young talent. Then why does the German economy perform so poorly by comparison, as the ZEW recently confirmed again in a study?! I think we need to be more honest with ourselves here.

For me it was definitely a highlight and a confirmation to keep championing the engineering profession and promoting it. But there are also big tasks ahead of us. You can read about these and many other highlights on the official VDI page.