Working Overseas
A few years after he joined the Corps, Dalton embarked on what would be one of the greatest projects of his life: the building of the King Khalid Military City, designed to help the Saudi government support weapons purchased from the United States.
"We moved to Saudi when my daughter was only three months old, and we spent five years there," Dalton says. "As an engineer, I got the opportunity of a lifetime— to design and build an entire city in the desert: water wells, hospitals, buildings, water treatment systems, and electrical plants… everything from nothing."
During his time in Saudi Arabia, he was promoted to Resident Engineer and managed the completion of a naval facility in Jubail. Then, Dalton, his wife, and their two children spent nine years in Cairo, where he became the Area Engineer responsible for all Corps engineering work in Egypt.
"When we work overseas, the Corps hires local engineers to help us on our many projects. When I was in Egypt, 60 to 70 percent of our engineers were locally hired," he explains, adding that his team had to do some investigative work to make sure all employees came from reputable universities and possessed the right job skills prior to hiring them. In hindsight, Dalton believes that ABET accreditation would have made that process a lot easier.
"Back then, we had to work with the U.S. Embassy and do some analysis on local [engineering] programs," he remembers. "If these same programs were ABET-accredited, we would have known that they had achieved the same criteria [as our programs back home]. ABET has a great advantage, as it doesn't tell [programs/institutions] what to change, but instead looks at what you have and works with you."
Joining the ABET Industry Advisory Council
Given his experiences worldwide, it comes as no surprise that Dalton accepted the invitation to become a member of the ABET Industry Advisory Council (IAC), in 2009.
"I joined [the IAC] because we are all in this business, and we all want to make sure engineering has standards," he states. "ABET is a keeper of these quality standards. If you come from an ABET-accredited program, we know what kind of education you have."
As an IAC member, Dalton has an opportunity to discuss some issues that are critical to the engineering community today and in the future.
"We are short when it comes to engineers, and as a consequence, it is tough to recruit. In a sense, all companies are competing for the same resources now. Today, industry hires people with training in construction management, and these professionals can work in areas such as cost, schedule, risk analysis, and contracts, essentially very important support areas. But when you have a shortage of engineers, you don't want to pull them out of your core business," he says.
Dalton also believes that online education is an issue worthy of serious debate.
"Online programs are here to stay, so ABET and industry need to prepare," he explains. "We need to adjust and understand that online learning will take place. But how do you find this balance? There are still a few things that one cannot do online, and lab work is one of them. We all know that, when it comes to engineering, a lot of the learning takes place in a lab, so can you make it part of a resident training somewhere?"
Reaching Out
Passionate about engineering and engineering technology, Dalton believes there is a lot to be done to encourage students to pursue careers in these fields.
"The percentage of dropouts in engineering is pretty high, so I spend some of my time mentoring some of our young hires, some college students, and even a few high school students interested in engineering. Especially with the college students, we must try to encourage them to stay in. I would say that we go out of our way to make engineering scary, so we need to counter that somehow," Dalton says.
As part of his outreach, Dalton often goes back to his alma mater to speak to aspiring engineers.
"Obviously, engineering has gotten more diverse, but that doesn't mean that we do not have a long way to go," states Dalton, who is the highest-ranking African American in the Corps. "When I go back now, the audience is a lot more diverse; it is still male-dominant, but there are females. In college, there were no females in my class, and just to have females in the engineering building was 'cool.' In engineering, diversity has more to do with gender because, in terms of cultures or nationality, it was always diverse. I went to college with people from the Bahamas, the Middle East, Sudan – it was not rare to have a lot of foreign engineering students."
Future engineers are sure to find inspiration in Dalton's enthusiasm, as he is still very much in love with the profession he chose nearly four decades ago.
"When you think about engineers, it is pretty simple: you give us a problem, we will solve it! Now, in my current position, you can argue that I don't do engineering anymore. But, like many others, you progress through the organization by showing that you can solve problems – that's engineering too," he says with a chuckle.