Panel Seeks Ways to Attract and Retain Workforce

Much like the U.S. Marines, technical industries and companies worldwide are seeking a few good peopleno, 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 discussionCrafting Business Strategy to Address the Problem of Demand Exceeding Supply for Human Capitalexplored related problems and possible solutions at the 2008 ABB Automation World in Houston this past April.

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

Nurturing Employees

Despite the historical difficulties, Margaret Walker, Dows 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. Were 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 Germanys 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, ABBs human resources director. This isnt a problem that can be solved in one shot with a silver bullet. Its an ongoing problem that each organization must tackle from where they are, said Steel. Some aspects of our businesses arent sexy, and so it may help to focus on the end results of what we produce.

Jocelyn Scott, DuPonts engineering vice president added that another constraint on attracting and retaining enough engineers is that many companies and managers dont 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, theyve 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, weve 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.

Now theres a lot of capital being invested, but theres still a lack of people. Dows Margaret Walker and other panelists discussed ways to address the global scarcity of engineering and technical talent.

To get involved before the university level, Scott added that DuPont participates in many programs for high school, junior high school and elementary school students. We get involved in junior high explorer posts, FIRST Robotics for high schoolers, and Girl Scouts Explore Tomorrow programs, she said. We also support programs for women and people of color because attracting these groups could really make a big dent in the number of people were going to need in the future. Were also helping to train grade school and junior high school teachers, who have a very hard job and often are ill-prepared to teach chemistry, physics and biology. Scott added that DuPont is even exploring ways to train potential employees in some correctional systems.Walker reports that Dow has used its recent Human Element advertising campaign to increase community and campus awareness, and that its already produced some internal and external gains. Dow uses a three-bucket Attract, Retain, Grow method to build its workforce. We also have a model that reflects what we think is going to happen to applicable populations, and this helps inform us about what we need to do, says Walker. Were not there yet, but we also need to be more consistent because, in the past, we had spaces of time where we didnt hire anybody.

Walker added that Dow also uses career maps to help it and its employees define and understand what peoples true needs are and then helps give them the tools they need to reach those goals. In the past, weve often been too conservative and concerned with filling traditional roles, and so we defined too narrowly the opportunities that we had for people. This means a lot of talent doesnt get used. So what were trying to do now is have people at each level of experience coach those at the level just below them. Were also looking at redefining our work processes and roles to make them more inclusive and take more advantage of new technologies, so theyll be more challenging and exciting.

Steel added that engineers tend to think of workforce development as just another engineering problem, but it isnt that simple. If you want to develop human skills, you dont give people a math problem to solve, said Steel. Whats needed is direct conversation between individuals about their skills, where they want to go and what they need to get there. Theres just no easy solution here.