Engineering has a white-male problem. Women make up just 14.5 percent of the engineering workforce in the United Kingdom, with ethnic minorities constituting just 8 percent. For Lila Ibrahim, chief operating officer at DeepMind, and Hayaatun Sillem, CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering, being both female and people of color meant the odds were stacked against them in their industry. But for Sillem, who is the first woman and ethnic minority to hold her position, coming from such a diverse background helped her "to build empathy into her life"--a trait she describes as a superpower. And as for Ibrahim, the daughter of immigrants to the United States, she always felt like the "oddball" growing up in midwestern America.

As commerce and society feel the impact of digitization, automation proliferates along assembly lines and deployment of robotics gathers pace, an influential U.K. academic at the operating helm of the country's engineering academy says the time has come to ditch old clichés and have an apolitical holistic dialogue about future engineering skills. Meet Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, who reckons such broader changes make it a "very interesting time" for engineers with the so-called Industry 4.0 or the next industrial revolution now firmly among us. "People should look at the ongoing transformation from a prism of not how many jobs will go, but rather at the changing nature and scope of roles and tasks. We should be optimistic that there would be many new jobs created partly through the fact that technology would enable us to do things we could not previously do." Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, says the broader societal changes we are witnessing make it a "very interesting time" for engineers.Calum McCarron Looking at the size of the opportunity in a global context, engineers are not only among those feeling the first effects of Industry 4.0 but are also the drivers of a shift towards a technologically astute low carbon economy, she adds.

As commerce and society feel the impact of digitization, automation proliferates along assembly lines and deployment of robotics gathers pace, an influential U.K. academic at the operating helm of the country's engineering academy says the time has come to ditch old clichés and have an apolitical holistic dialogue about future engineering skills. Meet Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, who reckons such broader changes make it a "very interesting time" for engineers with the so-called Industry 4.0 or the next industrial revolution now firmly among us. "People should look at the ongoing transformation from a prism of not how many jobs will go, but rather at the changing nature and scope of roles and tasks. We should be optimistic that there would be many new jobs created partly through the fact that technology would enable us to do things we could not previously do." Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, says the broader societal changes we are witnessing make it a "very interesting time" for engineers.Calum McCarron Looking at the size of the opportunity in a global context, engineers are not only among those feeling the first effects of Industry 4.0 but also the drivers of the shift towards a technologically astute low carbon economy, she adds.