The skilled labor shortage across industries is worsening with events over the last few years. Study after study shows the impact of the issue is taking a toll on operational effectiveness and business results.
According to Rystad Energy Research, Labor requirements in oil & gas companies are expected to grow over 12% in the next 5 years, more than recovering the 20% of the jobs slashed in 2020 due to the pandemic. At the same time, there is historically low unemployment, an acceleration of retirements, workers moving to more attractive jobs such as within the renewable energy sector, and high competition for a limited pool of skilled workers.
According to a 2021 study by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute: “8 in 10 manufacturing executives indicated that not filling jobs is significantly impacting “production levels to satisfy growing customer demand, responding to new market opportunities, supporting new production development and innovation, and even implementing new technologies. These aspects ultimately spill over and contribute to an impact on the overall growth of manufacturing companies”. In this same study, they found that finding qualified talent with the right skill set is 2.4x harder than it was just 3 years ago.
It’s time to look at improving the productivity of your current workforce while making jobs more attractive for recruiting. This article specifically addresses the shortage of skilled maintenance technicians.
The Growing Labor Shortage in Industrial Maintenance
The shortage of skilled industrial maintenance professionals is primarily attributable to three factors:
- Older generations are leaving the workforce
- Younger generations gravitating away from industrial maintenance
- Emerging technologies that require more diversified skill sets
Older Generations are Leaving the Workforce
The oldest baby boomers turned 65 on January 1, 2011. Every day from then until 2030, some 10,000 baby boomers will reach the traditional retirement age. The pandemic has also contributed to the mass exodus of baby boomers from the workforce. Pew Research reported that in the third quarter of 2020, about 28.6 million baby boomers stated that they were out of the labor force due to retirement. This represents a 3.2 million increase from the third quarter of 2019.
Many baby boomers have had vocational careers and occupied industrial maintenance positions. As they leave the workforce in droves, there is a lack of younger workers waiting to take their place.
Younger Generations are Gravitating Away from Industrial Maintenance
By 2025, Millennials will make up an estimated 75% of the global workforce. Yet Millennials have not gravitated toward careers in industrial maintenance. Rather, they have pursued higher-paying positions with flexible benefits in industries that they view as more progressive. For instance, McKinsey describes the oil and gas industry as being “placed on the wrong side of transition,” as well as suffering from a “misalignment between the career-progression timeframes and work-life choices the industry offers and the expectations of newer generations of talent.”
Emerging Technologies that Require More Diversified Skill Sets
The adoption of Industry 4.0 and maintenance management technologies is changing the nature of industrial maintenance jobs. These new technologies require technicians to be able to handle both physical and software-based maintenance and repair tasks. Older technicians that remain in the workforce often struggle to adapt to these new technologies. Younger generations, however, are more tech-savvy and can play a major role in driving organizations’ digital transformation initiatives, provided that companies can attract younger generations to maintenance jobs.
Overcoming the Skills Gap in Industrial Maintenance
For many organizations, addressing the skilled labor shortage in industrial maintenance will require improving their maintenance management processes using innovative new technologies. This will help companies to optimize their resource allocation and do more with less.
Leverage Automation Technologies
Industry 4.0 technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), process automation, and Machine Learning (ML) will undoubtedly play an instrumental role in helping organizations to overcome talent shortages. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that by 2022 “machines and algorithms will contribute 42 percent of total task hours, compared to 29 percent in 2018.”
With automation, organizations can eliminate repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks helping them to better allocate their human resources. According to Doc Palmer’s Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook, “Implementing proper planning and scheduling can improve the productive maintenance time of a typical organization from 25-35% to 50-55% – almost doubling the ability to get work completed.” This means that a company could, for instance, use a planning and scheduling automation solution to create optimized schedules for maintenance and repair tasks. The resulting improvement of wrench time by just 50% would equate to 10 technicians doing the work of 15.
Moreover, adopting these innovative and user-friendly technologies will make industrial maintenance careers more appealing to younger generations. For example, replacing paper-based maintenance processes with mobile devices cater to Millennials by offering connectivity and access to information wherever technicians are located.
Capturing the Knowledge of Older Generations
One of the greatest assets that many organizations still possess are workforces that have intrinsic knowledge of existing industrial maintenance processes. Organizations should seek to capture and pass on the knowledge of the retiring generation. For example, a planning and scheduling solution can improve the capture and structure of data to build better schedules. The system can be set up to prioritize work order tasks based on known dependencies. Thus, codifying the insights from years of experience with automation here and there in support of the process of transferring knowledge and reducing reliance on people.
Utilizing Visual Aids
Today’s industrial maintenance professionals have something that their predecessors did not – access to detailed visual aids and digital tools. With a mobile solution that gives maintenance workers access to procedures to complete a task while in the field, technicians can eliminate a lot of wasted steps in the maintenance process while improving the organization’s resource allocation.
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Download our guide, Practical Advice to Attract and Retain Industrial Maintenance Talent, for more tips to deal with today’s challenges of hiring and retaining your skilled labor in industrial maintenance jobs.
How Sigga Can Help
Sigga offers powerful digitization and mobile solutions that can help you improve your maintenance management process and work towards overcoming talent shortages. Sigga Mobile EAM is designed to digitize industrial maintenance tasks while Sigga Warehouse and Inventory manage warehouse procedures. These mobile solutions replace repetitive manual paper-based processes with user-friendly mobile features. They also provide robust functionality for both online and offline use with background auto-sync with SAP PM. You can benefit from connecting all users for real-time visibility to work orders and inventory status while improving data quality.
Sigga’s Planning & Scheduling solution allows planners to replace tedious spreadsheet work to automatically create a baseline schedule for maintenance and repair tasks. Organizations can automatically check capacities, assign resources, prioritize work orders, track order status, and make informed decisions based on real-time data in SAP.