Convincing managers to build up in house know how instead of outsourcing as a young professional

Question

Background: I graduated in 2019 with a bachelor degree in electrical Engineering and work in the electronics R&D section of a German power tool manufacturer for roughly a year now.

As a beginner I thought that I would be doing the circuit design and PCB layout myself to get experience but in fact I am mostly coordinating external engineering service providers and evaluating their solutions.

This is not only the case for me but also my more experienced colleagues do barely design something on their own.

This is okay for them, because they did projects on their own in the past. But for me as a beginner it is really difficult to evaluate designs, when I have very little experience due to my lack of own projects and just overseeing the work of others.

Therefore I want to convince my manager to give me some projects where I can play a more active role to gain experience instead of outsourcing. What can be good arguments for that, when outsourcing is the typical way in the company? Or are there any other options to gain professional experience?

As a Note:I really love to work in this company because of the cool products, nice colleagues and the premium working conditions.

Answer 1

Tl,dr:

Changing the way a big company does its business may not be possible for a junior engineer. Arrange yourself with the conditions, or look for another opportunity with a job description more fitting for you.

Why

What you experience is somewhat the norm for big tech corporations in Germany. I experienced the same in the automotive sector (BMW, Audi, their bigger suppiers...)

The work environment in those big companies is inflexible and strictly planned. There is a process for everything. Because of that, working on new things and driving change is hard. If you have to fill out three forms and collect five signatures just to add a new resistor value to your design, designing a new product in reasonable time becomes impossible.

This is the reason the "real" development work is outsourced to smaller, more agile companies. The engineers at "big corp" only coordinate the development effort of the smaller contractors.

Advice

That said, It might be possible to accommodate you at your current employer. Every company has some projects where they don't feel comfortable outsourcing. Maybe a real research project, where the goal is to build knowledge, or a project so small, that the overhead of outsourcing doesn't make sense. Tell your manager what you need to be successful, he may have something for you.

Answer 2

The obvious argument is exactly the one you've made - habitual outsourcing will stop the reproduction of expertise within your company.

Whether that will stop them outsourcing or not is unclear, because it'll be a decade or two before the firm (and indeed the geographic talent pool) is hollowed out, but in the meantime the bosses will be reaping great profits by outsourcing to lower-paid workers, or by buying generic inputs and selling them on under the reputation of a premium engineering brand.