While it might seem like companies with relatively younger staffs wouldn’t have to worry about employees close to retirement, many report they’re still in dire need of experienced candidates with necessary skills. These requirements are compounded by the fact that most process control and automation projects tasks, such as assessment, installation, configuration, startup and maintenance, still require tremendous amounts of onsite time and labor.

“We haven’t seen much of a brain drain internally because we skew younger as a company with senior engineers in their 30s and 40s. Our struggle is finding candidates with at least five to 10 years of experience,” says Eric Headington, engineering manager for instrumentation and controls (I&C) at ACS Inc., a system integrator in Verona, Wis., near Madison.

As a certified member of the Control System Integrators Association, ACS’ I&C group usually has about 25 staff, who work primarily on transportation, engineering and vehicle test, and aerospace projects. Consequently, it mostly seeks candidates with four-year mechanical and electrical engineering degrees, as well as some with physics and chemistry majors. Beyond seeking experience and education, Headington reports that ACS also needs staff who are willing travel because most of its projects and clients are located outside the Madison area, mostly throughout the midwest U.S. Despite the gains that virtualization and digitalization have made, most system integration projects continue to rely heavily on in-person installations and implementations of onsite equipment and infrastructure.

“We actually have more success hiring new graduates, but then training becomes even more of a challenge,” explains Headington. “One solution is that we try to hire staff that we’ve already had as interns.”

Grow your own engineers

Headington reports the I&C group usually has one or two interns per year, and presently has three. As a whole, ACS has 10-12 interns per year, who are distributed among the company’s 130-135 total employees and its six to eight engineering groups, including I&C, machine design, facilities, engineering and integration. The internship program begins with a week of onboarding meetings, and then three to six months of work on small to midsized integration projects, depending on their size, complexity and location. For instance, once they receive some instructions and oversight, interns can produce some P&ID drawings from scratch using AutoCAD or other design software, which can then be redlined and edited by their more experienced colleagues.

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“Interns do basic tasks on projects, where they help more experienced engineers. They get one-on-one instructions about what to do. Their mentors try to make the experience as meaningful as possible by providing the same direction as they give to entry-level engineers,” says Headington. “This isn’t just busy work. If the interns weren’t completing these tasks, then a regular engineer would be doing them. This training is combined with formal, online and self-paced instruction from suppliers about programming certain PLCs and other equipment. They also get AutoCAD training from ACS’ senior engineers, as well as introductions to instrumentation and control valve selection, and lessons learned every other week during postmortems about what we learned on projects and how it applies to what they’re doing.”

Headington reports that mentors and other experienced engineers can learn from these sessions as well, which is another good reason for allowing interns and entry-level staff to team up with their lead or senior engineering counterparts.

“Even if the mentorship program isn’t formalized, it helps to let everyone ask questions, provide them with meaningful tasks, and try strategies on their own without micromanaging them,” says Headington. “Handing off a task and allowing someone to try it shows pretty quickly what they know and where they need further guidance. We look over their shoulders more when we’re onsite or in our shop, but we also want our interns to gain experience and the ability to work independently because the intent of our internship program is to eventually hire them. Teaching likely candidates what they need to know ahead of time is a big help, and if we do it, then we know their training is good.”

Back to some networking basics

While digitalization and AI getting lots of attention, and altering required job skills, Headington reports they’re not having as much impact on many plant-floors, which are still transitioning from point-to-point hardwiring and fieldbuses to Ethernet and its protocols and programming.

“More networking skills are needed, but most curriculums don’t teach about Ethernet, let alone DeviceNet and ControlNet, which are still used in many applications,” says Headington. “So, even though Rockwell and Siemens have AI agents running on cloud-computing services, and users are asking for it, and it can help with text-based languages like Python, PLC programming via AI is still in its infancy. We still use ladder logic for most of our PLC code. AI can do some of these tasks, but it’s not as good as a person yet.”