The State of Engineering Management
A certification authority should do more than assess the discipline — it should measure it. Each year the Academy surveys engineering managers worldwide and publishes the findings openly: the practices, the pressures, and how the craft is changing.
The inaugural edition needs your ten minutes.
Fifteen questions on how you actually manage: your span of control, where your time goes, what is hardest right now, and how the discipline treats its own development. Anonymous by default — leave an email only if you want the report before anyone else.
Take the 2026 SurveyEngineering management runs on anecdote. Practices spread by blog post and conference talk, with little data on what managers across the industry actually do — how many reports they carry, whether they still write code, how they learned the job, whether anyone ever assessed them on it.
The Academy certifies against a published competency framework. That framework should answer to evidence — and the research program is how the evidence gets collected. It also keeps us honest: the survey asks, among other things, whether independent certification matters in hiring. We publish the answer either way.
One commitment, in keeping with everything else the Academy does: this research is not marketing. No vendor sponsors it, no respondent is added to a mailing list, and findings that are inconvenient for the certification business get published anyway. The report’s only job is to be the most accurate public picture of how engineering management is practiced.