Attracting Talent & Building Skills for In-Demand Industrial Roles.
As a fully integrated service provider with a family of brands specializing in domains from architecture to industrial robotics, Gray meets the needs of a diverse set of customers. To be most effective at identifying those needs and developing solutions, we not only need to draw from our own experts’ knowledge and experience, but also those of our customers. Such an approach puts people at the core. Developing strong relationships and solid skills is vital to this effort, with the onus on businesses to provide relevant training and opportunities to grow through real-world experiences.
The immediate benefit of investing in people is a talented workforce that can execute, meet targets, and grow the business, but this investment also results in an arguably even more important outcome: it keeps people around.
In this issue of Bytes & Insights, we’ll look at some of the roles impacting Gray and our customers, then examine how skills-based training and talent attraction & retention modernization can provide a competitive advantage in the industrial marketplace.
Examining Hot Industrial Jobs
As Gray’s business and others across its industry continue to grow, one can identify commonalities in the positions consistently experiencing high demand. Examining these roles can serve as a good lens into the talent needs for a wide range of industrial sectors, helping to empower recruiters and job seekers alike as they look to fill open positions.
Project Manager / Site Manager
To use a sports analogy, a project manager is the coach drawing up the plays, while a site manager is the point guard making the offense run. Both must master coordination and communication so that everybody knows their job and is in position to make the team succeed. This requires extreme attention to detail to orchestrate logistics and scheduling as well as effective leadership skills to develop customer relationships and resolve disputes quickly and evenly.
A project manager oversees a project’s many components, learns how they coalesce to form a functional whole, and works closely with stakeholders to meet goals. The project manager frequently acts as the bridge between executive leaders and those in the field completing domain- or trade-specific aspects of a project, while the site manager working on location must dedicate months, if not years, to constant travel and hands-on leadership. This stamina is essential to running operations smoothly each day and completing projects on time and under budget.
Process Engineer
Similar to industrial or manufacturing engineers, process engineers aspire for continual improvement in quality, efficiency, and consistency. Incremental improvements applied at scale can provide a competitive advantage for manufacturers, particularly for businesses producing advanced technologies such as semiconductor chips and long-range, fast-charging electric vehicle batteries. When process engineers can cut elements such as production times, material waste, energy usage, and process footprint, they lower overhead costs and directly impact their business’s bottom line. Such a talent makes these roles exceedingly valuable in emerging markets as well as those oversaturated with competition.
Information Security Specialist
An information security specialist isn’t so different from a site safety technician; both strive to create a safer workplace that protects the business and its people from threats accidental and malicious.
As digital technology assumes an ever-greater role in all sectors of business, the need for personnel who can safeguard these systems and train their colleagues to operate them responsibly becomes paramount. Much of the training and systems that information security managers put in place is to encourage best practices and prevent well-intentioned tech users from making costly errors. This can be accomplished by educating teams on the features of their system and communicating not only the full range of useful functions, but also the vulnerabilities.
Think you might be the perfect fit for Gray? Check out our Careers page to learn more about joining our team.
Sounds Like a Personnel Problem
While many tenets of successful talent acquisition are universal (fair compensation and benefits, advancement opportunities, and a healthy work environment), it’s not enough to tell managers dealing with industry-specific challenges to simply pay more, offer more PTO, or build company culture. Manufacturers need targeted solutions to labor shortages and skills gaps.
Simona Savitt, senior manager of human capital transformation at Deloitte, explained how robust training and ongoing education are key pillars to any such solution. In a recent webinar for the Manufacturing Leadership Council, she painted a picture of an industry facing acute labor needs:
Manufacturing currently has more than 400,000 vacant positions
Without successful interventions, experts estimate that this number could triple by 2030
83% of surveyed manufacturers cited attracting and retaining a quality workforce as their top challenge
45% reported having to turn down business opportunities because they lacked the workers to execute services and fill orders
Together, these figures reveal the scale and depth of the problem; despite its innovation and economic significance, manufacturing faces a talent crisis.
To better understand the situation, one must understand how the industry has shifted in recent decades. According to Deloitte’s survey, 60% of workers today hold a job title that didn’t exist in the 1940s. Experts predict that 65% of children will experience the same when they reach working age.
Manufacturers can get a jump on these efforts by partnering with secondary education programs to implement internships and apprenticeships to cultivate relationships through the entire talent lifecycle. Much of these education programs will necessarily be devoted to the operation and maintenance of automated technology.
As automation expands in its scope of use, sophistication, and precision, manufacturers often look at the potential overhead savings that come from its implementation, but they don’t often consider its impact on retaining talent they want to keep. Before implementing automated technology, manufacturers should identify the roles most at risk of elimination and invest in retraining, reassigning, and retaining top talent.
Such skills-based training should fall into one of three categories:
Human—people skills needed to better engage with people and work as an effective team
Procedural—process skills needed to build expertise in new ways of working
Technical—system-specific skills needed to operate or integrate a piece of technology
Without training programs that include specific, attainable goals in these categories, many workers simply feel that they are being left behind and begin to look for greener pastures before automation ever comes for their job. Transitioning an employee from a fully manual role to a hybrid automated role may require only a few new skills, but older team members may feel overwhelmed by what they perceive as major process overhauls. For this reason, it’s imperative that company leadership deliver the tools and support for them to learn and apply new skills. Manufacturers that fail to do this risk losing the talent class they most need—experienced workers who are familiar with processes, KPIs, and solutions to common problems and who have already proven their fit within the company’s culture.
Byte: Successfully implementing a modern training program requires manufacturers to establish effective two-way communication, commit the resources needed for team member buy-in, and provide meaningful exposure to new technology as early and often as possible.
For more information on how to attract the next generation of manufacturing talent while retaining today’s best and brightest, check out the article on gray.com.
Change of the Guard
There’s no denying that today’s professional landscape looks worlds different than it did just one generation ago. New technologies, a more globalized economy, and other complex factors have driven rapid transformation of the workplace. Similarly, cultural shifts and evolving corporate policies have resulted in notable changes in what workers expect from their prospective employers.
S.O.S. (Save Our Savings)
In the past, it was standard practice for employers in a wide range of sectors to enroll workers in a company pension system that provided a retirement wage commensurate with the number of years served. This provided a major incentive for a worker to remain with one company for their entire career.
Most employers have long since opted to replace costly pension systems with employee-funded 401k plans, but as costs of living have dramatically risen in recent years, the public has recognized the 401k’s inability to serve as a complete retirement solution. Today’s job seekers look for employers who will offer a significant match to their 401k savings rate—often up to 6% of the employee’s salary. Additionally, potential hires expect companies to provide supplemental plans such as Health Savings Accounts (HSA), which can also function as retirement tools due to their tax advantages and transferability.
Businesses struggling to meet hiring targets might benefit from implementing an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), in which employees accrue greater stock in the company with each year of service. Whatever the solution, today’s businesses are expected to help their people shoulder the burden of retirement savings.
Get Fun, Get Flexible
Increasingly, corporations must also compete for workers in the social and entertainment spheres. But setting up a ping-pong table in the breakroom won’t cure your staffing woes, and snacks are no substitute for salary raises. Changes must be impactful to your prospective hires, aligned with their values, and made from a genuine effort to make work more enjoyable.
To achieve this, corporations must expand their traditional views of compensation and benefits to include factors that younger generations hold in high esteem, such as company-sponsored outings at a local ballpark or eatery, workplace amenities like more comfortable seating, and continuing education and training tailored to individual team members’ needs. Better yet, allow team members whose roles don’t demand a full-time physical presence to work from home or their favorite coffee shop when reasonable. For those who can’t work remotely, develop flexible scheduling that gives team members more say in when they work.
Lift the Community, Lift the Business
Community enrichment is another arena that corporations should use to attract talent. In addition to the typical challenges of growing up and finding their career footing, younger generations face a unique set of stresses. From climate crises to caustic political divisions to feelings of isolation in a digitally driven world, these stresses can cloud one’s sense of purpose and paralyze attempts to make a positive impact.
Corporations are endowed with unique resources to facilitate outreach opportunities and community involvement. Their ability to leverage funding, professional networks, and proven leadership structures can remove obstacles that prevent the ordinary individual from acting and provide a clearer path to giving back to those in need. Not only does fostering community outreach demonstrate that your business values more than dollars and cents, but it can also be a powerful driver for social change and your people’s personal fulfillment.
Byte: New talent is looking for a whole lot more than a 9-to-5 gig. To attract today’s best and brightest, strive to create a team that looks like them, a workplace that appeals to them, and opportunities that resonate with their values.
