The Thin Middle: The Bench Engineering Firms Are Not Budgeting For

The industry has spent the better part of a decade talking about the shortage of engineers. It is a real shortage and it deserves the attention it gets.

The number that should worry a firm leader more is the shape of the bench above that shortage.

What the engineering workforce data actually says

Three sets of numbers, read together, describe the problem better than any of them does alone.

The ACEC Research Institute's Workforce of the Future study found that 42 percent of engineering firm staff have fewer than ten years of experience, with 28 percent under five years. That is a very wide entry floor.

At the other end of the building, Russell Reynolds analyzed more than 200 executives across seven of the largest global engineering services firms and estimated that roughly 35 percent of executive committee members, and 30 percent of EVPs, were 60 or older in 2024.

In between sits the layer that will actually run these firms in five years. The ACEC and FMI ownership transition study of engineering firm owners found that 84 percent call management succession planning important, 58 percent have formal succession plans for key roles, and only 13 percent have formal succession plans for key mid-level employees.

Russell Reynolds also found that just 39 percent of construction, engineering and infrastructure leaders describe their own organization as proactive in its succession planning.

Picture that as a building. A wide floor of early-career staff. A senior floor moving steadily toward retirement. And between them, the thinnest layer in the firm, carrying the people every succession plan quietly depends on.

Why the entry-level shortage is the wrong number to watch

Entry-level hiring is a solvable problem, and firms have gotten better at it. Campus programs, rotational tracks, internships, referral incentives and improved onboarding all move that number.

The middle does not respond to any of those levers.

A firm cannot recruit its way to a bench of ten to twenty year professionals who combine technical credibility, client trust and the ability to lead other leaders. That population is small, it is employed, and the firms that have those people are working hard to keep them.

There is a second reason the entry number misleads. It measures headcount, and the constraint is readiness. Two firms can have identical org charts and completely different succession positions, because one of them has spent four years deliberately moving responsibility down a level and the other has spent four years keeping its best people busy.

Headcount tells you who is on the payroll. It says nothing about who could carry a top-five client relationship next quarter, or run the region if the regional president left in March.

The distance between promoting from within and having someone ready

Almost every firm I speak with intends to promote from within. Intent is not the gap.

The gap sits between the intention and a named, prepared internal candidate for a specific seat. Closing it requires answering a few uncomfortable questions role by role.

• For each succession-critical seat, is there a named internal candidate, or a category of person we hope will emerge

• If that candidate stepped up in twelve months, which parts of the job would they genuinely be ready for and which would they not

• Who currently holds the responsibilities they would need to have already practiced

• What would have to change in the next four quarters for the answer to improve

• Does the candidate know they are on that path, and does anyone senior actively sponsor them

That last question decides more outcomes than most development budgets do. Coaching accelerates a leader the organization already believes in. It cannot create belief that is not there.

When firms work through this exercise honestly, the common result is not that the bench is empty. It is that the bench is real but two years behind where the plan assumed it was, and that nobody had ever put the assumption on paper where it could be checked.

What thin-middle risk costs on a major pursuit or a key client relationship

Bench depth reads like an HR topic until it shows up in the business, and it shows up in three predictable places.

On pursuits. Selection panels increasingly want to meet the people who will actually deliver the work. When the same three names appear on every major proposal, the firm is either overcommitting those people or presenting a team the client has not met and does not yet trust.

On client continuity. In a consulting engineering firm somebody has to own the relationship. When only one or two senior people can hold the top relationships, the firm has concentrated a meaningful share of its revenue in a small number of calendars and retirement dates.

On ownership transition. Valuation and deal structure both depend on whether the business runs without the current leadership group. A thin middle turns an internal transition into a financing problem, and it is the first thing a buyer or an outside investor tests.

None of these arrives as a crisis. They arrive as a slightly lower win rate, a client relationship that cools after a retirement, and a transition timeline that slips a year. The costs are large and they are almost never coded as leadership costs.

Where to start when the bench is thinner than the plan assumes

The work does not start with a program. It starts with a list.

Name the seats. Identify the roles the firm cannot afford to leave open for six months. In most firms that is five to ten seats, not fifty.

Score each one honestly. Ready now, ready in one to two years, or no internal candidate. Force the senior team to agree on the label, because the disagreement is usually the most valuable part of the conversation.

Pick the two or three seats where the risk and the timeline overlap. Those are the ones that get real investment.

Define what ready means for each of them in observable terms. Not more strategic. Something closer to leads the quarterly business review without the regional president in the room, or carries the primary relationship on two top-twenty clients.

Assign a sponsor and a date. Someone senior owns the development of that person, and the senior team reviews progress on a set schedule rather than when a resignation forces it.

Firms that run this twice a year stop being surprised. That is most of the benefit. The bench does not get deep because of a program. It gets deep because a small number of specific people were given responsibility earlier than felt comfortable, with someone senior paying attention.

If you want a second set of eyes on the two or three roles you cannot afford to leave open, book a call. We can map your own thin middle and separate the seats that have a candidate from the seats that have a hope.

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