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How can the maintenance engineering industry respond to challenges within the profession? Asked to imagine a typical maintenance engineer, what comes to mind?
If you pictured an older male figure, you wouldn’t be wrong – but you wouldn’t be totally right either.
In a recent survey of maintenance engineers conducted by RS and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), 92% of respondents identified as men. “There’s clearly a lot more to be done to attract women into the profession,” observes Emma Botfield, Managing Director, UK and Ireland, at RS, in her foreword to Industry in Motion: Maintenance Engineering Report 2023, which is based upon on the survey.
The age profile of respondents, however, might be more of a surprise. “Over half of the people we surveyed are Millennials, which the World Economic Forum identifies as people born between 1980 and 1994” continues Botfield.
This isn’t a quirk of the sample. As noted elsewhere in the report, data from the non-profit industry body EngineeringUK shows that over a quarter of the engineering profession in 2021 was comprised of people aged between 25 and 34, making them the largest single age group.
How is this change in age profile affecting maintenance engineering? Here we explore the impact and how organisations can successfully manage it.
Is there a brain drain?
Some in the maintenance engineering profession perceive the demographic shift as a threat. One respondent to the RS and IMechE survey, for instance, expressed apprehension that “the experience that will be lost in the industry in the next few years is huge and there is a large age gap to the next engineers coming through.”
Dr Moray Kidd, a maintenance engineering academic involved in teaching newcomers to the industry as well as those looking to advance their careers by returning to education, understands these concerns.
“Nowadays, there’s an incentive, certainly in the high-risk industries, such as oil and gas, for very experienced, capable engineers to leave the organisation in their fifties, partly because they will get penalised on their pension if they stay,” he states in the Industry in Motion report.
“I don’t buy this idea that everyone experienced is leaving”
Richard Jeffers, Managing Director, RS Industria
Others question the validity of these fears. “I don’t buy this idea that everyone experienced is leaving and there’ll be no one left in engineering in ten years’ time” says Richard Jeffers, Managing Director of RS Industria, a plug-and-play Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform.
“As long as I’ve been an engineer in a leadership role, I’ve been told that there’s a demographic time bomb when all the engineers are going to retire. And guess what? People retire, but then people come in. I think the pool is being replenished.”
“The numbers coming into the profession are very strong”
Dr Moray Kidd, maintenance engineering academic
Kidd agrees. “I’m not sure that this shift is any different to generations before,” he says. “In education, the numbers coming into the profession are very strong. That means that the people in the middle – the Millennials, if you will – have a lot of opportunity to make a difference.”
Optimism – and opportunities
Furthermore, both Jeffers and Kidd see reasons to be optimistic about what the new cohorts bring to the table. “Industry 4.0, specifically for maintenance engineering, has really energised a lot of interest for younger engineers coming into the profession,” notes Kidd.
Get them working alongside experienced engineers, adds Jeffers, and you get “the perfect blend of the digital native and the person who has practical engineering and problem-solving skills.”
Lydia Amarquaye, Professional Development and Education Policy Advisor at IMechE, shares this optimism. “Millennials are now reaching key decision-making positions within companies and they’re aspiring to make a difference in their organisations as well” she says. “They’ve grown up with different technologies and they will be trying to implement some of these in their work to make life more efficient for themselves.”
“I think it is going to be exciting for the industry as a whole”
Lydia Amarquaye, Professional Development & Education Policy Advisor, IMechE
This will have consequences beyond maintenance engineering. “I think we’re going to see the effects of this shift coming through in the way that businesses are conducted, as it plays into management styles,” argues Amarquaye. “So, I think it is going to be exciting for the industry as a whole.”
Such optimism doesn’t mean, however, that there are no issues in terms of recruiting new talent into the profession. Among survey respondents, almost half cited attracting and retaining talent as a major challenge in the next twelve months – ranking it as highly as inflation and higher costs.
Amarquaye recognises this problem. “I was previously an automotive engineer,” she explains. “Even when I was choosing to study engineering at university, I was being asked if I was studying to fix cars. So, there’s still a lack of understanding of what an engineer is and what an engineer does.”
Recommendations for the future
How can the maintenance engineering profession address these challenges and feel confident that the industry will continue to attract talent – and ensure that new entrants have the right skills for the job?
Promote different routes into the profession, including apprenticeships, to attract more diverse candidates, says Amarquaye. “Some people see it as sort of a lesser route into engineering,” she observes, “But, actually, you can go far through an apprenticeship. There are many businesses whose engineering leaders came through the apprenticeship route.”
“We’re expecting graduates to come into the profession and hit the ground running”
Lydia Amarquaye, Professional Development & Education Policy Advisor, IMechE
More co-operation between business and higher education is needed to better prepare students for entry into the workforce too. “We’re expecting graduates to come into the profession and hit the ground running, without having input from industry,” continues Amarquaye.
“It’s important they have the right skills for engineering and the right mindset, whether that’s around sustainability, or how they approach problems, but also having all the technical skills that they need to thrive in the workplace.”
“80% of the engineers who are in the workforce today will be there ten years from now”
Lydia Amarquaye, Professional Development & Education Policy Advisor, IMechE
This is crucial for the profession’s long-term future. “We don’t know what jobs are going to be available and we don’t know what type of engineers we will need for industry in 10 years’ time,” she concludes. “But we do know that 80% of the engineers who are in the workforce today will be there ten years from now. So, we need to make sure that those people are still looked after and invested in. They are the future of the profession.”
What about current challenges?
While these recommendations will sustain the profession going forward, what can organisations do if they are facing a skills gap in the here and now?
“Working with stakeholders to improve performance is a great way to find fresh solutions” says Emma Botfield, Managing Director, UK and Ireland, RS
Botfield advocates looking to your strategic partners for help. “When it comes to facing up to challenges, working with stakeholders to improve performance is a great way to find fresh solutions,” she states.
The survey by RS and IMechE survey shows organisations are already pursuing this strategy by turning to outsourcing when they cannot fulfil a function in-house, with respondents listing reduced headcount (35%), lack of skills among staff (40%) and too many specialised skills required (57%) as the biggest drivers of this trend.
You too can ask trusted suppliers what value they can add, says Botfield. “Investing the time to talk and have a conversation about what’s keeping you up at night, from a maintenance problem perspective, that’s when we can have great dialogue. And that’s where you can put a solution in place.”
