Serving With Purpose: The Mindset Technologists Need Most

November 6, 2026

Whenever I am lucky enough to talk with students and young professionals, I hear the same thing repeatedly. From Las Vegas, where I attended the IEEE Rising Stars Conference, to Bangalore, India, where I met with student STEM volunteers, young people are looking for a way to make a difference. They didn’t get into this field only for the title or the paycheck. They want to change the world.

At IEEE, our engagement research shows the same thing. Members increasingly cite the ability to give back to their community, both locally and globally, as a reason to join the organization. That gives me hope because I think it points to the mindset our profession needs most. It isn’t just about having sharp technical skills. What matters more is purpose: the habit of remembering who is on the other end of our work.

Whatever we build – from software to quantum computers to new AI models – that product or service is made better when we stop and ask who will use it and how it will improve someone’s life.

That question — who has a problem and what is their need? — is exactly where we started when we founded IEEE MOVE 10 years ago. It would have been easy to begin with the truck. We are engineers; we like the equipment. For two years before we unveiled the first truck, we ran paper exercises, and tried to imagine where our skills could fill a real world gap.

Most importantly, we sat down and discussed our concepts with real-world survivors of Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, two massive storms that disrupted the lives of millions in the U.S. Their stories touched our hearts.

IEEE’s 2025 Social Impact Report featured numerous examples of IEEE members serving local communities. Take, for example, BrailleGenAI. In Pakistan, where more than 1.5 million people are blind and thousands of children have no accessible learning tools, a student team from Mehran University of Engineering and Technology and the IEEE Karachi Section built a smart braille system pairing edge AI and generative AI with embedded hardware. A camera reads tactile braille blocks and returns spoken feedback through text-to-speech, with gamified modules covering literacy, numeracy, logical reasoning, and voice recognition. That example is but one if many. Through IEEE Humanitarian Technologies, a consortium that consists of Empower a Billion Lives, EPICSinIEEE, MOVE, IEEE REACH, IEEE SIGHT, IEEE Smart Village and IEEE Tech4Good, volunteers gave 177,000 hours of their time in 2025 in 52 different countries.

Humanitarian technology is sometimes mistaken for a softer branch of our profession. It isn’t. These are engineering problems in the fullest sense, constrained by budget, climate, and the absence of anyone to call when something fails.

Consider one project from this past year. In rural Brazil, the Escola Maria Teixeira has spent three decades providing free education, therapy, and medical and dental care to more than 300 people, many of them children and adults with disabilities. It funds part of its work by baking and selling the Brazilian cheese bread known as pão de queijo. The school’s grid was unstable and expensive. Volunteers from our Centro-Norte Brasil Section installed a 30-module photovoltaic array and inverter that now generates roughly 2,800 kilowatt-hours per month and has cut the school’s electricity costs by more than 30 percent.

It’s a project with the same challenges and specifications familiar to any engineer. It required load analysis against a real and uneven demand profile, array sizing for that site, inverter selection and protection, and — hardest of all — a design that staff with no technician on call can keep running for years. The team then made the installation itself a teaching instrument. Students now learn clean energy and power systems from the plant on their own roof.

My advice to young engineers and technologists is to start small. Find a local problem you understand and care about, and solve that.

The engineers and technologists who will solve the hardest problems of the next decade are the ones who pair technical skill with compassion and a sense of service, and who never lose sight of the human being their work is meant to reach.

That, to me, is what it means to be a technical professional in service to humanity: serving with purpose and leading with heart. It is also the embodiment of IEEE’s mission, a strategic asset that encourages membership and, we hope, sustains the profession we are handing off to the next generation.