Engineering has a talent problem – and it needs to get “sexy again,” GIC26 told

After two days at FIDIC’s Global Infrastructure Conference 2026 spent on financing, leadership and technology, the fifth plenary session turned to a more fundamental question sitting underneath all of them: whether the institutions and the workforce needed to actually deliver infrastructure are equipped for the job.

Moderating the session, “Building Institutional Settings and Skills for Sustainable Infrastructure Delivery,” Prashant Kapila, managing director of Intercontinental Consultants & Technocrats and president of the Consulting Engineers Association of India, opened with what he called an uncomfortable truth: nearly three-quarters of employers worldwide, and a higher share still in the public sector, say they are struggling to find the skilled engineering talent they need. The problem, he told delegates, is not simply one of numbers. Close to half the skills the industry needs today will look different again within five years, as climate resilience, digital tools and increasingly complex project environments reshape what “qualified” actually means.

Kapila framed the session as covering two distinct but linked problems – an institutional capacity question, over whether governments and firms have the right structures, procurement systems and standards to deliver, and a workforce question, over whether the industry has people with the right skills, in the right numbers, for the next 20 years of delivery. He told the panel he wanted to press them on where the real gap lies. He was also very keen to address a point that has been a live issue in the industry for many years, namely, the need to make engineering more attractive and “sexy” so that more young people wanted to consider it as a career.

Four firms, one shared shortage

Vishal Haripersad, managing director of Knight Piésold Africa and president of Consulting Engineers South Africa, addressed the question from both a member-association perspective and as the leader of a major firm operating on the African continent, weighing whether the shortage is really about headcount or about skill sets, and what a collective, industry-wide response looks like when no single firm can solve the problem alone. Haripersad also argued that engineers need a stronger seat at the table in decisions that affect infrastructure, telling the panel the profession has too often been sidelined from where the real decisions are made, and called for a higher profile for STEM subjects to inspire more young people into engineering careers in the first place.

Mads Brandt Rasmussen, director of transportation at Jacobs Denmark, gave the large-firm perspective on capacity building, addressing the shortfalls Jacobs is seeing and the trend of Scandinavian countries hiring engineering talent in bulk from other economies to plug workforce gaps. Rasmussen spoke to what that trend means both for his business and for people seeking to enter the profession, and touched on potential solutions being explored across Scandinavia, including government and EU-level responses to the shortage.

Yoshiya Nakagawa, executive director of PADECO, brought a Japan-specific and international development perspective, addressing how an ageing domestic demographic and declining interest among young people in engineering as a profession is shaping the country’s talent pipeline, and what that means for his firm’s growth and its approach to the issue. Nakagawa also spoke to PADECO's own work on capacity building and skills training across different economies, drawing on his organisation’s experience with Official Development Assistance and touching on the geopolitical effects of recent US policy shifts affecting institutions such as the World Bank.

Catherine Karakatsanis, senior vice president at Stantec, gave a further large-firm view on talent, addressing how global firms are responding in practice through recruitment, retention, reskilling and, increasingly, restructuring how work gets delivered – including global delivery models and AI-assisted workflows designed to offset shortfalls rather than simply work against them. “It is a fact that what took engineers days and days to do in the past now can be done in just seconds and that has got to change the way an industry operates,” she said.

The commoditisation trap

The key thing around harnessing talent in our firms and also wider society, Vishal Haripersad, was being able to identify that talent and also to encourage it. He thought that the way that infrastructure was perceived by people was an issue here as was the way in which projects were procurement which could lead to the commoditisation of infrastructure, which was not attractive to new people looking to enter the industry.

That recurring challenge, of whether professional engineering services can continue to be commoditised and procured primarily on price while still attracting, retaining and developing the talent quality and sustainable infrastructure requires, was seen as key to what a better definition of value for money, beyond lowest initial cost, might look like.

Before handing over to the next part of the session, Kapila asked each panellist for one piece of advice, beyond technical qualifications, that they would give to the emerging leaders about to present the outcomes of FIDIC’s Future Leaders Management Course. “Always be open to change,” was the key message from all the panellists, as this enabled engineers to have a vision of what things could look like in the future. They all reflected on and pointed to the inspirational keynote address delivered by Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi earlier in the day, as a real role model for engineering and the wider infrastructure industry.

Closing the session, Kapila highlighted the need to be open to change and to build inclusive and attractive institutions that were open to all and would enable more people to enter the industry. “Above all, we need to make engineering sexy again,” Kapila said.