Jill Tietjen

Engineers make the world work. Yet, as the baby boomers retire in conjunction with our aging infrastructure, there will be many challenges to keep the U.S. economy thriving. The demographics demonstrate that the historical engineer profile will be replaced with engineers of color and women. The challenges are many – and so are the opportunities. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2017 Report Card gave the infrastructure in the U.S. an overall grade of a D+. This means that water and electricity – two key underpinnings of our lives and workplace – will require significant attention and workers. Electricity was ranked as the top engineering advance of the 20th century. The widespread availability of clean water has been determined to be half of the reason for the increase in life expectancy in the U.S. from 45 years of age in 1900 to 77 years of age in 2000. We will need many engineers to build the bridges to our future. This presentation will discuss practices and information that will inform hiring decisions and retention statistics as we move into the future to face these challenges.

Biography:

Ms. Tietjen is the President and CEO of Technically Speaking, Inc. An electrical engineer, she spent 40 years in the electric utility industry where she provided planning consulting services to electric utilities and organizations comprising the electric utility industry and served as an expert witness before public utility commissions and other government agencies. In 2015, she served as the CEO of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, based in Seneca Falls, New York (the birthplace of women’s rights). Today, she is a worldwide advocate for telling women’s stories and writing women into history.

An author and national speaker, Tietjen is the co-author of the award-winning and bestselling book Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America. Her introduction to engineering textbook, Keys to Engineering Success, was published by Prentice Hall in 2001. Previously (as Jill S. Baylor), she was a contributing author to the 1995 book She Does Math! Tietjen is the co-author of the Setting the Record Straight series of which three volumes have been published. Her book, Inspiring Women of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, was published in 2015. Her ebook for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Women in Engineering series titled Recognizing and Taking Advantage of Opportunities was published in 2016. She is the series editor for Springer’s Women in Engineering and Science series and wrote the inaugural volume (published in 2016), Engineering Women: Re-visioning Women’s Scientific Achievements and Impacts. She blogged for The Huffington Post from 2014-2018.

Tietjen has received numerous awards and honors including Women eNews 21 Leaders of the 21st Century (2016); the 2001 Woman in Technology Award from the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, Subaru, and News4; Tau Beta Pi’s Distinguished Alumna Award; and she was named a Woman of Distinction by Girl Scouts – Mile Hi Council. In 2017, she received the Advocate for Women and Girls Award from Girl Scouts of Colorado and the General Palmer Award from ACEC-Colorado. She served as the 1991-1992 National President of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). She was the first woman president of the Rocky Mountain Electrical League, the trade association in the West serving the electric utility industry. Tietjen is a member of the Board of Directors for Georgia Transmission Corporation of Tucker, Georgia and serves as an outside director for Merrick & Company of Greenwood Village, Colorado. She has been inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame. Her story, titled “Engineering Women Back into History” was aired on Rocky Mountain PBS as part of the Great Colorado Women series in February 2018 and is accessible through the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame web site – video library.

Tietjen graduated from the University of Virginia (Tau Beta Pi, Virginia Alpha) with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics (minor in Electrical Engineering) and received her M.B.A. from the University of North Carolina – Charlotte. She is a registered professional engineer in Colorado.