The Hindu Business Line : Is it a lost cause?

More and more manufacturing organisations are reporting their inability to hire and hold on to quality graduate engineers from good campuses. They realise that most of them have been "made to order" for IT. The manufacturing industry offers jobs of substance and holds great promise for the country. It certainly deserves access to the best engineering talent.

Wikipedia describes Lost Causes as causes that cannot forseeably be won, but are pursued nonetheless. Trying to hire graduate engineers into manufacturing certainly seems like a lost cause. Many organisations continue to pursue the plan, nonetheless.

There is certainly cause for worry. More and more manufacturing organisations I speak to report their inability to hire and hold on to quality graduate engineers from good campuses. They realise that most of them have been "made to order" for IT. Even the few who are hired are not staying on for over 24 months. Those that have consistently invested in trying to build a strong cadre of graduate engineers feel frustrated when they realise that over a three-five year horizon, their net retention is extremely poor.

Nature of the problem

Three factors seem to have contributed to the problem of a diminishing stock of quality engineering talent in manufacturing businesses:

Poor responses on campus: The net addition of graduate engineers into manufacturing jobs through campus hiring programmes in the past six-eight years has been very poor. Given the huge attraction for IT careers, manufacturing does not even figure as an option for many. The few who do end up in manufacturing jobs feel like a fish out of water, not wanting to or just unable to work on the shop floor. Unable to deal with the social pressure from their IT peers, many exit in a year or two.

Mid-career drain into other industries: Those who have stayed on in manufacturing get easily poached by many of the new technology based outsourcing businesses that are coming into India for design and engineering services.

Minimal mid-career hiring: Given the very nature of manufacturing work where a lot of skills are learnt on the job, the industry cannot hire mid-career from other industries. Even where possible, concerns over internal parity prevent many manufacturing firms from hiring aggressively from outside. A combination of these three factors has contributed to the slow erosion of engineering talent from the manufacturing sector as a whole.

Current coping strategies

To deal with the situation many organisations have begun to hire diploma holders in large numbers. Organisations have also invested in their development and promoted them to managerial positions thereby securing a certain level of stability.

This has certainly worked very well and has helped organisations staff their frontline supervisory positions as well as their technical and entry professional positions.

Some others have adopted the strategy of hiring engineers from lesser-known colleges with the hope of securing greater tenure.

While these strategies have certainly helped in some measure, it has not helped them address the leadership gaps in many of the middle and senior management levels. They are also not able to staff positions that call for customer facing skills, design skills and higher order engineering and business skills.

Real barriers

While the average manager in manufacturing will tell you that pay is the biggest barrier to hiring graduate engineers, I do not think this is true.

In my opinion, the real barrier is actually psychological. Since many of the more modern industries started on a clean slate with no baggage of the past, they are able to adopt a much more "market based" relationship with their employees where employability and performance orientation is emphasised, talent is nurtured but also acquired, pay is impacted sharply by market forces and the responsibility for one's career is with the employee. On the other hand, having grown up with a culture of long-term orientation, many manufacturing organisations are finding it hard to shift gears and embrace this new order. This psychological readjustment is the first necessary step to change.

There are a few other things that will help:

A talent mind-set: At the risk of generalising, I must say that the average manager in manufacturing has not yet developed a "talent mind-set." He does not see himself as an ambassador who can and should scout for talent and market the organisation actively to attract the best. Many are so caught up in the procedural aspects and bureaucratic rules that they fail to pay attention to the "selling" dimension and are afraid to take some risks in going out and getting good talent.

Managing perception: In my opinion, a Deming award is perhaps a lot more precious than a PCMM assessment. Yet, IT companies do a much better job of leveraging PR value out of every such small accomplishment in comparison to their colleagues in manufacturing. Indian manufacturing certainly has a lot to brag about in terms of its global accomplishments. Yet, very few business leaders in manufacturing come out and talk about it, if not for the benefit of their own organisations, at least for the benefit of the industry's image in the minds of young prospective employees. Remember, the younger generation goes by what they see in the media and I think they should see a lot more of manufacturing celebrities and success stories.

Addressing the tangibles: Be it more progressive job titles or a more rapid career progression or adding some bells and whistles around physical infrastructure, manufacturing organisations can certainly get better. Tangibles certainly influence the perception that today's employees have about the organisation.

The manufacturing industry offers jobs of substance and holds great promise for the country. It certainly deserves access to the best engineering talent. Some psychological realignment and some aggressive efforts will certainly help. If these are hard to do, there is one other wicked way out — just add the word "technologies" to your company's name. It will certainly do the trick!

(The author is founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic consulting firm that designs and implements HR systems and processes for organisations across diverse industries. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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