Industry digest: Skills shortage keeps car bosses awake at night

Car industry faces a skills shortage in an age of disruption and digitalisation

Following Covid and Brexit, there’s no magic button to solve the car industry’s recruitment backlog

You would think that the chip shortage and costs of technology transformation top the worry list for car-industry leaders, but there's a much bigger and scarier topic that's rarely spoken of in public.

Our industry is driven by advances in technology, and Autocar has charted them since 1895, fuelling the interest in people to follow automotive careers. But in the excitement of seeing new technology evolve, it's easy to forget that it's developed, delivered and maintained by skilled people, without whom it remains just a great idea or prototype.

Today’s transformation of the industry through connectivity and electrification is dependent on a pool of talented individuals to develop and maintain vehicles – but there aren't enough of them to go around.

The industry is facing a skills shortage of such magnitude that businesses are seriously struggling to capitalise on the opportunities that new technology is bringing.

There isn’t a meeting I go to at the moment in which senior leaders aren’t talking to me about how they can’t find the right talent for their businesses.

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It's a skills shortage that's touching all areas of the sector and all levels of seniority, from operational staff to data and software specialists, from engineers to e-commerce experts.

One global business leader told me that the struggle to find qualified service technicians was the one thing that kept him awake at night.

The issue has been getting significantly worse over the past five or six years and is now coming to a head, magnified by the impact of the pandemic, Brexit, low unemployment rates, competition from other sectors and the sheer pace of technological change in terms of electrification and digitalisation.

And as we all know, low supply coupled with high demand means only one thing: spiralling wage inflation. I’ve heard stories of technicians being offered an extra £9000 to switch companies and starting salaries for engineers being hiked by 50%.

I can’t pretend there's a magic button to solve the skills problems facing the industry, although having a cogent but adaptable talent strategy with a clear set of skills priorities is an absolute must for businesses navigating such a disruptive period in the industry’s history.

It's all very well getting enthused about technology and the idea of transforming yourself from an automotive company to a tech firm or mobility provider, but unless you have the right people, you haven’t got a business.

In the post-pandemic era, that talent strategy also needs a coherent attitude towards flexible working. For some businesses, this is still a work in progress, and I've seen instances of tugs-of-war going on within companies between those who accept flexible working as a fact of modern life and those who want their workers back in the office or on the shop floor full-time.

If the industry is going to deliver its technological promises, the skills gap needs to come out of the shadows as the topic that we daren't speak about.

Innovation and creativity are the DNA of this industry, and we need to use them now more than ever, or business leaders might never sleep again.

*Lynda Ennis is the founder of global automotive and mobility executive search company Ennis & Co*