Strategic planning is a core part of who we are at Nitsch Engineering. We believe in putting in the work to identify a clear plan for growth, breaking the plan down into implementable steps, and then working the plan until we achieve our goals.
In February 2020, as we began working on a new strategic plan to carry our firm into the future, we knew that we needed to talk to our clients about what they were seeing in the market. A month later, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way many of us saw the world – and the future.
As we began to look past the immediate impacts of the changed world around us, Nitsch Engineering performed a market research study in June 2020. We invited some of our top clients to answer 10 questions, with the goal of understanding what trends will play out in the next three to five years that may impact the architecture/ engineering/ construction (A/E/C) and building industries markets.
We interviewed 22 clients, including a blend of architecture firms, construction management firms, engineering firms, commercial development firms, academic institutions, public agencies, and municipalities. We then sifted through our clients’ comments and sorted them into the STEEP analysis framework, which breaks trends out into five key categories:
Based on client feedback, the top trend in each category is:
The top five overall trends are:
The percentages shown for each trend reflect the number of comments made for that trend as compared to the total number of comments made in the entire survey.
We are sincerely grateful to the clients who participated in this survey for taking the time to talk to us about what they see happening in the market. Taken together, the trends they identified give us a perspective on the future that is full of challenges and opportunities.