The Wright Technical Services team traveled to Chicago this week for the annual Rockwell Automation Fair. A significant portion of our business revolves around automation so this was a fantastic opportunity for our team to entrench themselves in all things robotics, controls, SCADA, operational technology and industrial cyber security.
From a learning standpoint we're still on information overload. While there's all sorts of tidbits we could share with you, our team felt it made sense to document a short list of items related to engineering workforce trends.
- The demand for engineers isn't slowing. We spoke to countless engineering leaders throughout the event and they were all hiring. No exaggeration, every one of them had openings and were struggling to hire technical talent. While we're all seeing IT layoffs in the news, if you're an engineer you can definitely breath a sigh of relief.
- Robots have done little to decrease the demand for people. Everywhere you turned there was a robot of some sort. Of course the pitch is that robots, more specifically co-bots, are here to help supplement the human workforce. Unfortunately we hear there's tons of 'show' but very little 'go'. Engineers share that the promise of these plug and play robotic co-workers has become a bit of a joke in the industry. That said, investments in robot development are increasing rapidly and maybe, just maybe, we will work alongside R2-D2 in the not so distant future.
- Integrators are becoming staffing companies. We sat in on a workshop on the topic of Employee Retention. This was a hot topic and the room was filled with integrators who were there to figure out how to keep their people. An unexpected sub-topic came up that the entire room seemed to agree on, the integrators' clients are now asking the integrators to staff automation positions on a contract basis at their companies. Even Rockwell Automation themselves now has a staffing offering.
- Engineers are going remote. This one surprised us. Much of the engineering world is still required to be on site when working, at least that's been our experience. Well that officially seems to be changing. We'd estimate that 75% of the companies we spoke to have moved their engineers to working hybrid or fully remote.
- For engineers, development equates to retention. The topic of retention went beyond the workshop we attended. It was a theme in a number of conversations. The consensus seems to be that, at least for engineers, the way to retain your people is to develop them. This starts with understanding where they want to take their careers, and asking are there other roles they would be interested in exploring. Then ensuring you are providing the training and learning opportunities for those individuals to eventually develop into that role. The companies that make development a priority have far less problems with employee retention.
Were you at the event? If you were we'd love to hear about your takeaways in the comments.
