Modelling World 2022: what modellers think....

We began to survey professional attitudes at Modelling World 2021, and have been taking this forward with the Transport Planning Society. Add your thoughts about the modellers of the future and help us shape the debate....

Changes in societal and travel trends, and the push to decarbonise transport and development – plus new techniques and tools to help us understand and manage such change – will be key issues for Modelling World 2022. 

We began to survey professional attitudes at Modelling World 2021, in a session led by Tim Gent, Atkins, and have been taking this forward with Tim's help and with the Transport Planning Society.

The plan is to capture a wide range of insights, to process and analyse the inputs, and then to share outputs for discussion with our data and modelling community during 2022.

If you haven’t already, you are invited to participate in our Modelling World / Transport Planning Society survey.

It will take approximately 10 minutes to complete the questionnaire. Your survey responses will be strictly anonymous and confidential and data from this research will be reported only in the aggregate.

This survey is aimed at anyone currently or previously working in Transport Modelling, anywhere in the world. It's a more detailed survey that follows on from a live polling session at Modelling World 2021. You can find out more about this session online

So far, our responses suggest:

About half the respondents are under 40, but 10% is over 70! Just under 50% has worked more than 10 years as a modeller. About half of the respondents are UK based.

• About half of respondents have an engineering or transport planning background

• Ninety percent only became aware of transport modelling as a career at University or later

• Almost two thirds of respondents are impacted by the lack of skilled modellers; and this mainly increasing pressure on existing staff

• More than two thirds of respondents expects to still be modelling in 3-5 years, and the majority of these because they find the work interesting and worthwhile

• Modellers are not very diverse. 85% of the respondents is male, 75% white and almost three quarters don’t believe that the profession is representative of wider society

• Modellers are highly qualified: three quarters of respondents holds a master’s degree or PhD