Leadership skills increasingly in demand for engineers

Engineers Australia’s chief engineer, Katherine Richards, says Australia needs a new generation of engineers who can combine technical excellence with leadership, communication and sound judgement.

Speaking at the 2026 Young Engineers Australia South Australia Executive Breakfast recently, Richards said engineers must play a greater role in shaping decisions around AI, clean energy, defence, infrastructure and climate resilience.

“Australia does not simply need more engineers. It needs a new generation of engineers equipped to tackle these enormous challenges facing the nation,” she said. “Engineers are more than builders of the future: they are pivotal to the nation’s well-being and prosperity.”

The call comes as workforce pressures persist. Engineers Australia research shows almost 70,000 engineers are set to retire over the next decade, while engineering job demand is predicted to grow by 20%. At the same time, women remain significantly underrepresented, accounting for only around 16% of Australia’s working engineers.

Richards said in today’s jobs market, employers were also placing much greater emphasis on leadership and initiative. Jobs and Skills Australia analysis shows the proportion of engineering professional job ads mentioning initiative and leadership rose from 16% in 2015 to 43% in 2025. For engineering and construction managers, it increased from 39% to 67%.

“We need to retire the idea that communication, collaboration and leadership are ‘soft skills’,” Richards said. “There is nothing soft about explaining complex engineering risk or leading teams through uncertainty or challenging decisions when safety and ethics are at stake.”

Richards told the audience, (the majority of whom were early career engineers) that artificial intelligence was reinforcing, rather than diminishing, the importance of human judgement.

“AI can help engineers do more, but it doesn’t remove the need for human oversight and critical assessment,” she said. “As technology takes on more routine tasks, knowing what questions to ask, whether an answer makes sense, what risks it creates and how it should be applied becomes even more valuable.

“Successful engineers know how to use technology intelligently, question it, validate it and apply professional judgement to its outputs.”

Image credit: iStock.com/Ridofranz