Your firm hired last year. Your proposal team still can't keep up. Those two things are not in tension — they are the same story. AEC firms increased headcount across the board in 2025, and 46% of them ended the year with zero net workforce growth. Proposal teams were the first to feel the gap, because proposal work runs on institutional memory, and institutional memory is exactly what walks out the door during an attrition cycle.
The Numbers Behind the Treadmill
Bridgit studied 114,000+ construction and AEC workers and published the 2026 report earlier this month. Two findings frame the story:
- Median industry attrition is 18.7%. Almost one in five people on an AEC payroll at the start of a year are gone by the end of it.
- 46% of firms reported zero net workforce growth in 2025 despite 71.7% increasing headcount. Firms were hiring. The same firms were losing people at roughly the same rate. Net change: flat.
Layer that against the ACEC Q1 2026 Engineering Business Sentiment survey of 628 firm leaders. Backlogs are near a full year. Two-thirds of firms plan to increase hiring again in 2026. Ninety-one percent cite political uncertainty as a concern — which tends to push firms toward chasing more opportunities, not fewer.
Now pull in the proposal-side data we already have from the 2026 benchmark of ~300 AEC proposal professionals: 63% of proposal teams regularly work overtime, 88% report high stress, and 44% of firms miss 20–29% of incoming RFPs because they cannot respond in time.
Put the three data sets together and the story is not "proposal teams need to adopt AI faster." It is "proposal teams are running on a workforce that turns over every five years, and the work that gets lost in every turnover is exactly the work that makes proposals possible."
What Actually Walks Out the Door
A proposal coordinator who has been at a firm for four years knows things that do not live in any system:
- Which principal takes two days to review a draft and which one needs it the night before
- Which subconsultants actually deliver a resume in the template you asked for versus the ones who always send a Word doc you have to rebuild
- Which project descriptions in the library are "current" and which ones describe the scope as it was proposed, not as it was actually executed
- Which clients care about DBE participation and which ones will penalize a team for over-emphasizing it
- Which PE license in the firm is about to expire and has been about to expire for eighteen months because nobody has owned updating it
None of that is on a job description. None of it is in an onboarding document. And when that coordinator leaves, somebody — usually the principal, usually on a Friday afternoon before a Monday deadline — has to rediscover it.
This is the real capacity loss. Not hours per submittal. Institutional readiness per pursuit.
The Five-Year Qualification Library Problem
Here is a test worth running this week. Pick your firm's top 10 project experience sheets — the ones that show up in almost every SF330 submittal. For each one, ask:
- When was this project description last updated?
- Who wrote the original?
- Is that person still at the firm?
- If not, who inherited ownership of keeping this current?
For a firm with 18.7% annual attrition, the math is simple: after five years, the entire workforce has turned over. The qualification library — staff resumes, project experience sheets, past performance narratives, boilerplate Section H language — was authored by people who no longer work there. Nobody has explicit ownership. The library drifts. Details go stale. And the proposal team that inherited it spends part of every pursuit validating facts that used to be instantly trusted.
This is not a tooling problem your firm can buy its way out of with headcount. Hiring a second proposal coordinator does not stop the first one from leaving. Adding a marketing assistant does not back-fill the institutional knowledge that departed with the senior PM who retired in Q4.
Why Proposal Teams Feel It First
Most functions in an AEC firm have some mechanism for absorbing turnover. Project delivery has drawings, specs, deliverables, and ongoing client relationships. Engineering calcs are documented. Financial history lives in the accounting system. None of these functions are immune to turnover, but they have durable artifacts that outlast the individual.
Proposal work does not. The "artifact" of proposal work is the submittal — a moment-in-time assembly that gets delivered and archived. Between submittals, the knowledge that produced it lives in people's heads, in Word documents on shared drives, and in email threads nobody maps. When those people leave, the knowledge goes with them.
That is why the same industry data can show rising hiring and flat proposal capacity. Firms are replacing bodies. They are not replacing the unsystematic knowledge those bodies carried. And proposal work — unlike project delivery — has no way to absorb the loss.
The Reframe
Most firms treat proposal capacity as a staffing question: "Do we have enough people to respond to the opportunities in our pipeline?"
The data says the better question is: "When half our proposal knowledge turns over every five years, are we building the kind of durable content that survives the turnover?"
If the answer is "no, our proposal content lives in Word documents and people's memories," then the next capacity problem is eighteen months away no matter how many coordinators you hire.
This is why the firms that are actually pulling ahead on proposal throughput are not the ones with the biggest teams. They are the ones that have moved staff qualifications, project experience sheets, and reusable proposal content out of shared-drive documents and into structured systems where ownership is explicit and updates propagate. The turnover still happens. The knowledge stays.
What Principals Can Actually Do About It
Three things, in order of impact.
First, inventory what walks out the door. Spend 90 minutes listing the proposal-critical knowledge that is not written down anywhere at your firm. Who knows which PE licenses are current? Who knows the last five times the firm was shortlisted by each agency? Who knows what changed in the SF330 process between 2019 and now? If those names are concentrated in two or three people, that is your exposure.
Second, stop treating the qualification library as everybody's job. A library that everyone owns is a library nobody owns. Assign a single internal owner — even part-time — to staff resumes, project experience sheets, and proposal boilerplate. Put that ownership in the job description. The attrition math does not change, but the turnover cost does when the ownership transfer is explicit.
Third, ask the right capacity question in your next planning meeting. Not "can we chase more pursuits?" but "what happens to our proposal pipeline if our top coordinator leaves in Q3?" If the answer is "we'd miss a shortlist," the problem is not capacity. The problem is that the pursuit pipeline is running on one person's memory.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is proposal team attrition higher than the rest of the firm?
The Bridgit data is aggregated across construction and AEC functions and does not break out proposal/marketing roles specifically. However, SMPS and APMP surveys consistently show proposal coordinator turnover running above firm-wide averages, and 3,005 open AEC proposal coordinator jobs on Indeed at current salary benchmarks (roughly $65,905 median per ZipRecruiter) is a leading indicator of role churn.
Does hiring a second proposal coordinator solve the capacity problem?
It solves the workload problem for six to twelve months. It does not solve the knowledge problem. If both coordinators maintain their own mental map of the qualification library and neither is documented, the attrition exposure doubles — the firm now has two people whose departure creates a knowledge gap.
What is the single highest-leverage fix?
Move staff qualifications out of individual Word documents and into a structured system with named ownership. When staff resumes live as structured data — one profile per person, generating any format per pursuit — the information survives the turnover of the person who was maintaining the Word files.
How much does proposal coordinator turnover actually cost?
Indirect costs are larger than direct costs. Direct replacement (recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity during ramp) typically runs 50–100% of annual salary. Indirect costs — missed shortlists, proposals submitted with outdated content, client relationships not transferred — compound over the 6–12 months it takes a replacement to rebuild the mental map.