Panel Seeks Ways to Attract and Retain Workforce

Much like the U.S. Marines, technical industries and companies worldwide are seeking a few good people—no, make that a lot of good people.

To help end users and suppliers deal with increasingly scarce engineers and technical professionals worldwide, a five-member panel discussion—“Crafting Business Strategy to Address the Problem of Demand Exceeding Supply for Human Capital”—explored related problems and possible solutions at the 2008 ABB Automation World in Houston this past April.

Leading off the discussion, John Thuestad, president of Alcoa’s primary products division, reported that his biggest challenge is renewing his workforce at all levels. “Sure, we mine bauxite, and it’s a smoky, dusty process,” said Thuestad. “However, we also make several thousand products, and so we’re trying to sell Alcoa as an interesting place to work to tomorrow’s workforce, and we face this same challenge worldwide.”

Nurturing Employees

Despite the historical difficulties, Margaret Walker, Dow’s vice president of energy solutions, technology centers and manufacturing/engineering work processes, said attracting and retaining new engineers and technicians is still a manageable problem. “We’re still able to find and hire people, but the cycle time this requires is longer, so we have to plan much further ahead and do a lot more due diligence.”

Veli-Matti Reinikkala, president of ABB Process Automation, reported that even though Germany’s engineering graduates declined from 50,000 per year in the 1980s and early 1990s to about 35,000 in recent years, this figure has once again climbed to above 40,000 in the past couple of years. “This is one piece of good news because we need people now, so we often have to go outside and recruit from India, but this means we get 20-to-26-year-old students without much experience,” he said.

While labor costs are far less in Asia, it can also take longer to create products there because many employees lack the experience and know-how that allows their European counterparts to turn out products more quickly, claimed Gary Steel, ABB’s human resources director. “This isn’t a problem that can be solved in one shot with a silver bullet. It’s an ongoing problem that each organization must tackle from where they are,” said Steel. “Some aspects of our businesses aren’t sexy, and so it may help to focus on the end results of what we produce.”

Jocelyn Scott, DuPont’s engineering vice president added that another constraint on attracting and retaining enough engineers is that many companies and managers don’t use all of their employees’ available skills, and instead use them only in narrowly focused areas and in old processes. “A lot of the workforce is now 50 to 60 years old, and they could leave at any time, so we need to predict when this is most likely to happen and build up more early-career talent before it does. Though 50-to-60-year-olds also do mentoring, they’ve also been tasked more with increasing efficiency and productivity in the past, and so a lot of knowledge about how to mentor has been lost. Eventually, this mortgage is going to come due, and we will have more serious situation.”

Attract, Retain, Grow

To enhance its own workforce, ABB has spent that past five years developing an inclusive leadership model and has used it to train 25,000 of its employees, suppliers and customers worldwide, said Steel. “In the medium term, we’ve hired a global head of recruitment to show the value of working for ABB, but we still need to get more into the hearts and minds of young people in the long term,” he said. “It may help to think that the lifecycle of each graduate is about $3 million over the course of a career, and, if we hire 1,000 graduates per year, that works out to about $3 billion per year. If we were talking about an equipment investment of this size, many managers would pay a lot more attention to this a lot sooner.”