Boeing is fighting brain drain as engineers pursue the allure of space

The average Boeing engineer’s tenure is shrinking as low-level talent leaves the struggling aircraft maker.

Boeing is cutting jobs by 10 percent companywide, and this month a second round of layoffs brought the total number of union-represented engineers to 400.

The blow to morale comes as engineers, freed from the “velvet handcuffs” of long-term benefits, compare the turmoil at Boeing to the lure of space companies staking out exciting goals.

According to the union that represents 12,000 Boeing engineers, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, the average tenure of a Boeing engineer has fallen from 16.4 to 12.6 years over the past decade. Seniority was reduced across almost all age groups, with employees in their 20s and 30s having shorter years of service on average, as did those in their late 40s to 65 years.

The risk of this “brain drain,” as analysts, recruiters and union officials have described it, is that it could disrupt ongoing operations and make it harder for Boeing to bring its next new plane to market.

“All of that experience is lost,” said Matt Kempf, senior director of compensation and retirement at SPEEA. This is a cause for concern because “aerospace engineers are not made, they are grown.”

Boeing said it “remains in a strong position to compete for and retain top aerospace engineering talent with market-leading salaries, benefits and work-life balance.”

“For several years, the voluntary turnover rate at Boeing Engineering remained in the low single digits and has declined since 2022.”

Competition with the aerospace industry to recruit and retain talent is one reason Boeing’s engineers’ tenures are shrinking.

The company is fertile recruiting ground for Blue Origin and SpaceX as Washington state’s space industry has boomed over the past four to six years, said Stan Shull, founder of consulting firm Alliance Velocity. He estimates that about 15 percent of Blue Origin’s Puget Sound workforce has experience at Boeing.

Boeing has had problems in recent years. Two fatal crashes led to the plane’s global grounding in 2019, while there have been two public mishaps this year, one when a door panel flew off a jet during a commercial flight and the other when NASA chose rival SpaceX to to return two astronauts to Earth.

The disasters of the past five years have left the company scrambling to repair its balance sheet, and Chief Executive Kelly Ortberg said in October that Boeing would cut 10 percent of its workforce, or 17,000 jobs.

Boeing has also held off on announcing a new plane, withholding from engineers a moonshot project designed to capture the imagination. The last “neutral” aircraft was launched 20 years ago and became the 787.

Ortberg said in October that “we need to develop a new aircraft at the right time in the future, but we still have a lot of work to do before then.” In contrast, competitor SpaceX said it was pursuing interplanetary travel.

“Engineers are easy,” said Bank of America analyst Ron Epstein. “If you put them in a room with Coca-Cola, donuts, a pizza and a cool problem, they’ll never leave. So do you want to fix some old planes that have production problems or do you want to go to Mars?”

Seyka Mejeur is the managing director of AdAstra, a Washington-based recruiting firm specializing in engineering talent. Not every engineer can make the jump from aviation to space – they need experience with safety-critical systems – and not everyone wants to. Some prefer the work-life balance at Boeing to the long hours of newer companies.

Still, Mejeur said she has watched the exodus from Boeing and other legacy defense companies over the past five years, a trend that she said has accelerated this year because of Boeing’s problems.

“One of the bigger resistances candidates have to startups is risk,” she said. “Traditionally, they felt safer when they chose an old organization. When these legacy organizations go through these big layoffs. . . It gives them the opportunity to consider riskier startups because now that factor is neutral.”

Boeing can no longer stem exodus by promising pensions and retiree health care, powerful incentives that once kept employees sticking around for decades. The company ended retiree health insurance for those hired after 2006 and pensions for those hired after 2013.

According to SPEEA, about 1,700 engineers retired in 2022, compared to a normal range of 240 to 360. A change in federal law and rising interest rates caused a significant number of engineers to retire or take a cut this year had to accept a reduction in their pension allowance of up to $350,000.

Union officials say the departures affect Boeing’s “root knowledge” cultivated over decades, shorthand for workers’ understanding of how to design and build airplanes. The remaining engineers are less efficient because they may now have to spend an hour looking up the answer to their question instead of asking a more experienced colleague.

It also led to workflows for Boeing employees to serve as inspectors on behalf of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, a program called Organization Designation Authorization, said Rich Plunkett, director of strategic development at SPEEA.

ODA members told FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker during his visit to Boeing earlier this month that Boeing employees who submitted their work for ODA approval sometimes lacked the experience to do so properly, Plunkett said.

A report written in February by aviation experts from airlines, academia, unions and Boeing itself concluded that “experienced personnel are leaving and not being replaced, and efforts to retain them are neither effective nor timely.” . A similar problem exists with the FAA and its related oversight of the ODA.”

Boeing said the ODA unit’s engineers were among the manufacturer’s most experienced and that their coaching was an essential part of training aspiring engineers.

The FAA said it would continue “aggressive oversight” of the plane maker.

Boeing’s approach to recent layoffs has also impacted work, Plunkett said. In the past, engineers have generally honored their notice period. Now the company is paying them for 60 days but asking them to stop working.

“We get calls from people asking, ‘Who’s picking up my work?'” he said.

But the biggest question raised by engineers leaving Boeing is what will happen when the company begins designing and building a new plane. Epstein likened the problem to muscle memory: “If you want to design new things one day, you have to use that muscle.”