Modern career navigation: preparing for success despite uncertainties.

If a single word had to be used to describe the modern industrial engineer, a term such as eclectic or diversified would be appropriate. Even the profession itself could be termed similarly given its breadth of applicability. Industrial engineers are just as likely to apply their knowledge and abilities to reduce wait times for amusement park rides, to optimize the location of a surgeon's instruments in an operating room, or to determine the best locations worldwide for distributing products and services.

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Despite the wide range of employment choices available to them, industrial engineers have not been exempt from the increasingly uncertain employment environment of contemporary society. While the demand for the skills possessed by many industrial engineers is likely to grow, the way in which one's personal tool kit maps to a particular job will require more frequent updating, better networking with others (particularly non-engineers), and more personal responsibility regarding career management. In other words, industrial engineers need to evolve, grow, and constantly deepen their knowledge and network base to meet contemporary and future challenges.

Engineers have undoubtedly been among the primary drivers of the industrial progress that has occurred during much of the previous century. They may be considered the critical link necessary to create the commercial applications that satisfy perceived societal needs. Nearly every product we come in contact with has likely required the services of an industrial engineer to improve its quality, reduce its cost, or optimize the supply chain necessary to make it available whenever and wherever we decide we can't live without it.

However, the relationship between engineer and employer has changed substantially over the years. In the era leading up to the 1970s, employers generally provided benefits such as lifetime (at least long-term) employment, generous pension plans, and fully paid health care to employees. Such an arrangement, a social contract, really, assumed that both parties, through economic peaks and troughs alike, would remain together. The following decades were accompanied by economic tumult, including high energy prices, stagflation, foreign competition, and the resulting unraveling in many sectors of U.S. manufacturing. This helped transform the relationship between engineer and employer into a transaction-oriented contract with a more metered and regulated exchange of skills and benefits between the two.