Each year, the Deltek Clarity A&E Industry Study gives architecture and engineering firms one of the clearest pictures available of where the industry stands — financially, operationally, and strategically. The 47th edition surveyed 896 firms of all sizes and types, and the throughline across every section is the same: this isn't a market that rewards guessing. It's a market that rewards intentional, data-backed decisions.
This is the fifth and final installment in our blog series walking through each section of the Study. We're closing out with the section that ties them all together: the people who actually do the work.
The headline for Human Capital Management this year is a shift in focus. Firms are moving from growth mode to sustainability mode — from "how do we hire more people" to "how do we keep, develop, and deploy the people we already have." Turnover is still elevated at 13.8%, the highest in five years, but relatively unchanged from the prior year. Hiring has stabilized. What hasn't stabilized is the pressure to build workforce systems that hold up: ones that connect learning, planning, and staffing decisions to real data instead of instinct.
The skills firms need most are the ones data-driven teams build faster
For the first time, the Study asked firms to name the skills they'll need most over the next three years. Strong project management topped the list by a wide margin at 70%, followed by AI literacy at 41%. Rounding out the top five: collaboration (34%), adaptability (34%), and change management (26%). Decision-making under uncertainty came in at 22%.
Look at that list again and a pattern shows up fast. Project management, collaboration, and sound decision-making all depend on the same thing: everyone working from the same accurate information. A team can't collaborate effectively if half of them are working from a spreadsheet and the other half from the system of record. And nobody makes a confident decision under uncertainty by guessing harder — they make it by having the right data in front of them at the right time.
This is exactly the argument we've made throughout this series, especially in our Project Management post: the tools don't replace good judgment, they support it. A well-configured Vantagepoint environment, paired with clean CRM data, means your PMs, your BD team, and your leadership are all looking at the same numbers instead of reconciling three versions of the truth. That's the foundation the most-needed skills on this list are actually built on.
Learning and development just became a metric that matters
Learning and Development hours entered the Study's list of tracked KPIs for the first time this year, and it didn't ease in quietly. It landed at 49%, immediately one of the most widely tracked metrics in HR, just behind the long-standing top three of revenue per employee (67%), voluntary turnover (63%), and employee retention (63%).
That's a meaningful signal. Firms aren't just talking about development anymore, they're measuring it. And the reason is straightforward: the skills firms say they need most, like collaboration, adaptability, and sound project management, aren't the kind of thing you learn from a slide deck. They're built through mentorship, repetition, and hands-on experience.
If your firm is starting to track L&D hours as a real metric, it's worth asking content and programs fill those hours. A recorded video counts. Someone sitting with your project managers while they work through real scenarios in Vantagepoint tends to stick a lot longer. That’s where Full Sail Partners consultants can lend a hand; reach out if you’re interested.
The technology gap that's quietly limiting workforce strategy
Technology investment in HR is growing, but it's uneven. LMS adoption grew 5.6 percentage points, yet many firms still rely on spreadsheets and manual processes to track workforce skills. That gap limits the ability to connect learning investment to talent deployment, succession planning, and long-term workforce strategy. Firms with more connected HR infrastructure are simply better positioned to act on their data and respond quickly to changing staffing needs.
We see this pattern constantly, and not just in HR — project data trapped in a spreadsheet, marketing leads that never make it into the CRM. The information exists somewhere in the firm. It's just not connected to the systems that need it.
More than four in ten firms haven't touched their HR system in over five years, and small firms in particular are still operating on aging infrastructure. That's not just an HR problem, it's a strategy problem. As the report's outlook puts it plainly: an LMS without a skills tracking practice, or a new HR platform that doesn't connect to project staffing and financial data, won't deliver its potential value. The priority should be integration — connecting people data to operational decision-making so that workforce planning and project capacity planning inform each other in real time.
That's a high bar, but it doesn't have to happen all at once. Closing those gaps one connection at a time is exactly what the Blackbox Connector is built for: bringing HR, project, and financial data together instead of leaving it scattered across systems that don't talk to each other. If your firm is trying to figure out what a more connected HR setup could look like, our HRIS integration webinar walks through it in more detail.
Workforce capacity and planning is a top challenge for a reason
When firms ranked their top challenges in managing human resources, succession and career development planning held the top spot at 49%, but workforce capacity and planning came in a close second at 40%, reflecting how hard it still is to align staffing levels with shifting project demand.
Workforce capacity is a particularly sharp challenge for engineering firms, where it ranked even higher at 44% compared to 35% for architecture firms, and it hits medium-sized firms especially hard. These firms are often complex enough to have sophisticated staffing needs, but without the dedicated HR infrastructure larger firms can lean on to manage it.
Staffing decisions live at the intersection of two things firms often keep separate: who's available and what work is coming. When those two pictures don't talk to each other, firms either overstaff and eat the overhead or understaff and burn out the people they can least afford to lose.
Vantagepoint has some resource planning capability built in, enough for many firms to get a real read on who's available and where. But as staffing gets more complex, across multiple offices, disciplines, or a growing project load, some firms need more: longer-range forecasting, what-if scenario planning, or a more granular view of capacity by role and skill. That's what Vantagepoint's planning module add-on is built for. Either way, the point isn't buying more software, it's making sure resource availability and pipeline data live in the same system instead of two. If workforce capacity keeps showing up on your firm's list of top challenges, check out a few of our mini-demos on planning.
Firms are hiring younger — but the support structure isn't keeping up
One of the clearest strategic shifts in this year's data is how firms are thinking about their talent pipeline. Targeting new graduates and younger professionals debuted as a response option and immediately landed at 47%. Career paths defined within the firm for candidates followed at 42%. Firms aren't just competing on pay anymore — they're investing earlier in the pipeline and making the path forward visible before someone even accepts an offer.
That's a smart play, especially as the availability of experienced candidates remains the top talent acquisition challenge at 80%. But hiring younger talent only works if the infrastructure to develop them is in place. And right now, the data suggests it isn't. Mentorship programs declined as a formal initiative this year, even as the skills firms say they need most are precisely the kind built through experience and guidance, not coursework.
Modern performance management practices did gain ground, growing nine percentage points to 28%, reflecting a shift from annual reviews to continuous feedback. That resonates with younger employees, but feedback isn't the same as development, and it doesn't replace the hands-on guidance that turns a new hire into someone who can run a project.
Firms are naming the right priorities. The next step is turning them into something more durable than a to-do list.
The bottom line
This year's Human Capital Management data tells a consistent story: firms are shifting their attention from hiring more people to getting more value, insight, and longevity from the people they already have. That shift only works if it's backed by real data. Skills you can't see, learning you can't measure, and capacity you can't forecast are all the same problem wearing different hats.
The firms making real progress are collaborating so that a decision about training, staffing, or succession is made with actual information instead of a best guess.
That's the theme that's run through this entire series, from technology adoption to business development to project delivery to the people doing all of it. Intentional decisions require good data. Good data requires connected systems. And connected systems are something we spend every day helping A&E firms build.
Catch up on the full series: Technology Trends | Business Development | Financial Management | Project Management
Want to talk through what the Clarity Report data means for your firm specifically? Contact us — we'd love to dig into it with you.
