An engineering leader from DuPont says the process industry needs to attract skilled workers amid the Baby Boomer retirement wave.
David Bell, DuPont control systems manager, spoke about the issue of skills development during the 2023 Honeywell Users Group event in Orlando, Florida, on June 19. He was joined on stage by Manas Dutta, group manager, Honeywell Workforce Excellence.
The speakers stressed the need to ensure the workforce is prepared to work with new information technologies (IT) in addition to legacy purpose-built operational technology (OT).
“We’ve had lots of retirements, and COVID really accelerated that,” began Bell, acknowledging that all organizations are also looking to be more productive without adding staff. Meanwhile, jobs are evolving continuously, often with increased scope of responsibility. “We need to attract and retain top talent, and traditional learning methods are often ineffective for a new generation of workforce,” he said.
One of the main topics during the session was the persistent struggle to balance engineering and IT skills.
“It’s amazing how much of the control system engineer’s job has moved from optimizing process performance to managing patches and configuring networks,” said one attendee.
Some discussion participants said they have met the challenge by recruiting younger workers with IT skills into the organization.
“I’ve found that we’re on a Microsoft schedule now,” said one controls engineer. “We hired some young IT talent, and they were a godsend from a systems perspective,” he said.
Others have embedded IT professionals in the OT group to help process controls engineers to focus on higher value work.
To read the original article, visit Chemical Processing's sister site, Control Global.
