What’s needed to inspire, educate, recruit, train/retrain and retain process control engineers and operators these days? If you don’t know, you’d better find out because there are some epic obstacles in the way.

First, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Baby Boomers have retired from the process industries, and more are following them. Many veteran operators and engineers have already been replaced by younger, less-experienced counterparts. However, vast amounts of hard-worn experience and precious know-how have been lost in many individual processes, disciplines and industries.

Second, this already Grand Canyon-sized knowledge gap is widening even further due to accelerating digitalization and other technical advances. They consist of ongoing shifts from point-to-point hardwiring to fieldbuses, Ethernet networks and wireless, and migrations from dedicated, hardcoded I/O and PLCs and other rigid hardware and operations technologies (OT) to more flexible, programmable I/O, generic silicon boards, software-based controls, increasingly dynamic simulations and digital twins, cloud-computing services and other information technologies (IT).

Even highly experienced engineers and operators have found themselves with new job descriptions that need them to perform new tasks, and typically learn and apply entirely new skills. On the other side of the experience coin, the need for process operators and engineers is so great that many candidates with zero experience are transitioning in from unrelated and less-promising jobs, though they obviously need extra training and conditioning to have a chance of success.

Third, there continue to be millions of unfilled jobs in U.S., North American and European process industries, manufacturing, business, agriculture, municipalities, service industries and elsewhere. Even worse for the U.S., mindless attacks by the Trump Administration on immigrants and ethnic minorities are choking off one the nation’s best sources of willing, potential employees just when they’re needed most.

Faced with this triple-threat of continuing brain drains, tectonic technical shift, and self-destructive federal policies, how are process industry managers, administrators, owner-operators and other leaders responding—not to mention the engineers and operators themselves?

Installments

1. Training, training and more training to refill the brain drain: Novaspect’s Adatafy outlines the continuing labor crisis and educational and other useful remedies.