An Engineers Week Message
from
Samuel J. Palmisano, Co-chair Engineers Week 2008

IBM is proud to co-chair Engineers Week for the third time. For nearly a century, engineering has been at the core of our business – so we see clearly that its importance and potential are greater today than ever before.

Thanks to the digital network revolution, the reality of globalization and the rapid development of fields as various as computers, electronics, communications, software, chemistry, materials science, aeronautics, bio-medicine, environmental sciences, robotics and safety engineering, we are seeing greater and greater demands – and opportunities – for engineering solutions across  the entire scope of business and society.

How will we meet this demand? To start, we must build a pipeline of future engineers. And Engineers Week has always recognized that the best way to start that is to have today’s leading engineers meet with students, to get them excited about engineering opportunities and to advise them about how to prepare for a career in engineering. IBM itself takes advantage of the Engineers Week campaign to recruit volunteers from our workforce (nearly 5000 volunteers for EWeek 2007) to meet with students around the globe.

But simply seeing the future that’s out there isn’t enough. The next generation of potential engineers must see themselves in that future. And that is why the theme of EWeek 2008, “diversity in engineering,” is so vitally important. We need to recruit engineers from a broad cross-section of society, and this means reaching out to populations that are underrepresented in the engineering professions. Only 11 percent in the United States today are women, 3 percent Blacks and 4 percent Hispanics. These statistics reveal a large reservoir of potential engineers that is not being fully tapped.

I encourage you to use the EWeek 2008 campaign to inspire the next generation of engineers, reaching out to a diverse cross section of youngsters, independent of gender, ethnicity, or physical disability. And finally, let’s engage the general public to see, touch and embrace engineering, the source of so much of the prosperity, growth and hope that are reaching more and more people around the globe.

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