Future Forward: Engineering 2025: Navigating Change, Seizing Opportunity, and Shaping the Future

For the engineering industry, 2025 will be a year of change, some uncertainty, but mostly tremendous opportunity. All told, there has never been a better time to be an engineer or an engineering firm. Metric by metric, market by market, and sector by sector, there’s reason for excitement about the future of the industry.

The ACEC Research Institute is the thought leadership center for the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), the business voice of the nation’s engineering industry. Since 2021, the Institute has released a quarterly report of engineering business sentiment, using data compiled based on the responses from leaders of hundreds of firms of all sectors and sizes. The findings of these studies have pointed to sustained optimism—quarter after quarter of blue skies.

The Institute’s annual economic forecast projects nearly $469 billion in revenue this year, a 2.9% nominal output growth over 2024. Even as revenues and rates of growth come back to Earth after the stratospheric gains realized post-COVID, up is still up, and the forecast is for that trajectory to continue through at least 2029, with average annual growth of 3.6%.

Indeed, the one persistent pain point is one born of success: too much work and not enough qualified talent to perform it. More than half of the firms surveyed reported turning down projects because of ongoing workforce shortages. “Too much work” may be an enviable problem, but it’s a problem, nonetheless.

The business of engineering is at a crossroads, where the relentless march of technological progress meets human ingenuity and precision. The unstoppable momentum of artificial intelligence (AI) and the widespread shift to hybrid and remote work have created twin opportunities for the engineering industry. The proliferation of AI has led to significant growth in the power market and created a huge demand for private data centers.

With AI poised to reshape our economy, these data centers have become the backbone of this technological revolution, housing the vast amounts of information that fuel AI’s capabilities. Data centers saw a 60% increase in investment during the first three quarters of 2024, so it’s not surprising that respondents to the Institute’s business sentiment survey for Q4 2024 pointed to this market as one of the top five on which they were most bullish. The World Economic Forum refers to AI as a $4.4 trillion global opportunity, and the engineering industry is well positioned to realize enormous gains from this rapidly expanding technology. AI is more than just a tool. It’s a gateway to a new frontier that empowers us to forge a path that can uplift all corners of our society.

 

The world is in the midst of a new technological epoch in which long-promised technologies are finally entering the marketplace. This blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flurry of innovation was not spurred by the 2020 pandemic, but it certainly was hastened and expanded by it. As professional frames of reference shifted from conference rooms to Zoom rooms, that shift created tremendous incentives for tech companies to make the virtual office available at scale.

They did it so well that thousands of companies and millions of workers rarely return to the office. The shift to remote work has been one of the most significant societal changes of the last 50 years, and the office market has been dented because of it. Conversely, the increase in remote work has created demand for new homes, with 5 million housing units built since 2020. Despite interest rates and high material costs, the housing market is expected to increase by 20% in the coming years. When one door closes, the engineering industry builds another door.

The ability to capitalize on AI and remote work—both of which are here to stay—are just two examples of a strong industry that’s responsive to market and societal demand. Throughout history, engineering has been a catalyst for progress. It’s a new world, and it’s a world made possible by engineers.