The Engineering Services Market – Insights and Opinions

This is a BIG topic.

Like any good engineer would do, let’s start by bounding this discussion a bit:

1. We’ll focus on the engineering services market in the US specifically.
2. We’re not going to try to exhaustively discuss the entirety of the engineering services market. We’ll discuss enough to hopefully give you a sense of the magnitude of the market and get specific to help improve your mental model of what we’re dealing with.

The engineering services market is a collection of mostly-independent market segments that provide various types of engineering services.

These services are determined by market needs, not by functional discipline or degree. Each market need has a corresponding problem to solve. Here are a few examples of problems to be solved that engineers get involved with:

1. Designing a new product.
2. Designing a new piece of software that gets put into another system for internal use within a company.
3. Designing a component or subsystem (a chip, a circuit board, a module) that eventually gets put into a car.
4. Improving a manufacturing process by developing new manufacturing equipment to better mold, weld, assemble, …. components.
5. Automating the assembly or test of a part that’s being manufactured.
6. Designing and maintaining the physical infrastructure that people rely on every day (roads, bridges, buildings).
7. Designing and maintaining the IT infrastructure (e.g. servers, networks, workstations) that people rely on every day.

Engineering services – in your face vs behind the scenes

Some engineering services are easier to wrap one’s head around because of the resulting product that’s right in your face. Other engineering services take place behind the scenes; they’re more invisible. You wouldn’t necessarily know that an engineer was involved.

In some cases, these engineers work directly for the company that produces the product. In others, they work for external companies that support some or all of the design and manufacturing of the product or infrastructure.

The more in-your-face scenarios

If you look at many of the products you buy or use:

• lights,
• TVs,
• gaming consoles,
• phone apps,
• Streaming video services (e.g. Netflix, Hulu),
• bikes,
• furniture,
• cars,
• phones,
• ….,

chances are, engineers designed the product.

This is easy to grasp, since someone must design these products. They don’t just happen by chance. This is what engineers do. They create, and they analyze.

The more behind-the-scenes scenarios

What’s less obvious to many people that aren’t in the engineering world is that there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make our lives as consumers and citizens possible.

A few examples:

• Manufacturing products with a particular level of quality and cost in mind
• Getting those products to the store or to your house
• Keeping all your favorite software apps running
• Getting clean water to your house
• Getting electricity to your house
• Building and maintaining roads, bridges, sidewalks

Companies rally around market problems

A few of the market problems that engineering services companies help solve:

1. Manufacturing process setup, automation, and improvement
2. New / updated hardware products introduction or updates for various industries and categories
3. New / updated software products for various industries and categories
4. Utilities design and updates (e.g. water / wastewater, the grid, oil and gas)
5. Building roads and bridges
6. Building buildings

These segments, in turn, get more specific to become market niches that engineering services companies can rally around.

Often times engineers master a discipline (e.g. mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, etc), first in school, and continued in their job. They identify with that discipline, often a functional one. This identity often extrapolates to it becoming part of the engineering company’s identity.

Let’s say a company has a bunch of mechanical engineers. They might see themselves as being able to solve all sorts of mechanical engineering problems. However, this is often too inside-out-focused (i.e. too company-centric, and not market-centric). Market needs are likely more closely related to things like:

1. HVAC design
2. X product design (where X is a category or industry of interest)
3. Water engineering
4. AWS cloud consultants
5. Etc….

So, the hierarchy looks something like this: market => market segment => niche.

How big is the engineering services market?

On first blush this seems like a good question, but it’s not really useful at this high of a level.

If you’re operating in the engineering services market, you’re not (or you shouldn’t be) competing much with the market at large. Or, if you’re trying to sell to the engineering services market, you’re likely not selling to the entire engineering services market.

Therefore, you first need to find/select a market segment, refine to a specific niche, and then assess the size and characteristics of interest for each niche.

My SWAG sense after living in the engineering world and caring deeply about the engineering services market since starting RocLogic in 2019 is that there are something on the order of ~100 niches within the engineering services market in 2025 (depending on how tightly you define a niche vs a sub-niche and how much of the software development world is included).

Company sizes

Engineering services companies range from 1-person companies to companies with thousands of employees. Without any significant analysis to back this up (I did a bit of filtering within LinkedIn and this is my rough estimate), my sense is that the bulk (>80%) of engineering services companies have less than 250 employees. Take that estimate with a grain of salt.

It’s all about the SMEs

The core of engineering services revolves around the SME (Subject Matter Expert).

These individuals have developed domain expertise, usually with some combination of:

1. functional (e.g. software, chemical, mechanical, electrical, computer, structural) knowledge
2. industry (e.g. automotive, aerospace, medical) knowledge,
3. tools / platforms / languages (e.g. AutoCAD, AWS, ProE, C#, Python, ….) knowledge.

This combination of knowledge and experience is what makes them valuable.

Personality characteristics of leadership and employees

Every human is unique. Given that reality as a starting point, there are several characteristics that are common to many (not all) engineers.

Methodical

Engineers tend to love sequences of steps to follow to get things done. Along with this, they like labels and categories to help define the world around them, more than the average person.

Data-driven

Engineers ❤ data. Some more than others, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find an engineer that would run away from data. They’re driven to quantify the world around them.

Rational (tempered emotions)

Engineers tend to be very rational. They can think through complex abstract problems and make them real. This is what helps them turn an idea into something tangible.

They’re very good at keeping emotions out of their thought process.

Skeptical

Want to irk an engineer? Give them an absolute. Tell them that something is “always” this, or “never” that. It’s not that this isn’t ever the case, it’s just that engineers are good at finding the exception, so if you’re going to throw out an absolute, be ready to back it up.

Risk-averse

Engineers generally don’t like taking chances. They like things that are deterministic. This helps them in their quest to design or analyze a product or system, and makes them less comfortable getting involved with things like sales and marketing.

Frugal / efficient

Engineers love efficiency! From how they get their job done, to how they get around in a vehicle, to how much energy they use at home. This desire for frugality serves them well in many aspects of their life, so they have trouble letting it go when it doesn’t serve them (e.g. people management, sales, marketing).

Defer to expertise

Most engineers with more than ~5 years of experience consider themselves an expert at something. However, when they get outside their lane, they quickly defer to other engineers who they deem as having more expertise on the topic at hand.

Buying criteria – selling to engineers

Buying criteria for engineers is a direct result of their personality characteristics. A few thoughts on selling to engineers:

1. Show, don’t tell. Engineers want to see evidence and draw their own conclusions.
2. Don’t be pushy. Let them come to you with a problem / need. Let them go at their own pace. Otherwise you’ll just be pushing on a rope.
3. Teach, don’t sell. Engineers like to understand the world around them.

Marketing of engineering services

Doing marketing for engineering services companies is not for everyone. Many people find engineering boring or confusing.

Doing marketing for an engineering company can be challenging because engineers tend to dislike marketing. It’s fuzzy, involves human behavior, and it’s non-deterministic….pretty much the opposite of engineering 🤣.

If you’re interested in marketing for engineering services, you may find these articles interesting:

• Niche selection obstacles – poll results and insights
• Roadblocks that stop tech services companies from moving forward with their marketing
• Advertising for engineering firms
• Content Marketing for Engineering
• Creating a no-BS marketing strategy for your engineering company
• Good and bad marketing ideas for engineering companies
• How to get started with digital marketing – for engineering companies
• How to Sell Engineering Services
• Inbound marketing for engineering companies
• Inbound Marketing Readiness Self-Assessment Calculator
• Lead generation for engineering – insights from an engineer
• Marketing for Engineering Consultants
• Marketing for Engineering Services Companies
• Marketing for engineers – thoughts on transitioning from engineering to marketing
• Marketing plans for engineering companies
• SEO for engineering companies
• Website Strategy for Engineering Companies
• Why you need a niche for your engineering company