The skills gap

The UK has an issue with its ageing workforce and nowhere is that issue felt more than in the service industry. With thousands of field service workers retiring each year, skills gaps and staff shortages are causing big headaches for organisations that rely on their field operations. Some estimates suggest over 30% of utility workers are within five years of retirement, and some 70% of service organisations indicate a loss of talent and knowledge as a major challenge. Qualified engineers represent just 1.2% of the UK workforce; this means that by 2050 the UK may have a deficit of 36,800 engineers.

As more and more experienced engineers retire, the battle to recruit and retain new field service talent is heating up.

Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and field service organisations cannot afford not to replace the valuable experience of the older generation. Failure to replace talent would have a hugely negative impact on the business such as increased costs, decreased profit, unmet KPIs or SLAs and decreased customer satisfaction.

Let's consider some ways in which better knowledge sharing can help you address the skills gap.

Building knowledge repositories

Better knowledge management and information sharing is vital to hold the combined knowledge of your experienced field technicians. By collating this valuable data, your new recruits can benefit from an easy-access source of insight and best practice.

We feel that it's good to organise your knowledge repository by experience levels, service type and technician type to make searching simple. Organisations that leverage knowledge management outperform those that don’t, by nearly 20% in service level agreement compliance and have 14% higher first-time fix rates.

Engaging your technicians

Engaging your experienced field force and encouraging them to share their hard-earned knowledge is crucial to the success of your future business. But having them actively 'give away' years of experience can be a challenge. As experienced technicians are constantly in high demand, they require a more structured environment to remove them from their day-to-day duties and encourage the transfer of their knowledge. Different methods and technologies are likely to be needed to empower and engage the broad range of field service engineers, young and old, to share and gain knowledge. Having been born into an era of connectivity, the newer generation of field technicians will not only want - but expect to access knowledge by a mobile device while in the field.

Developing a skills pipeline

Many organisations are being increasingly proactive in their efforts to attract, and retain the brightest and best students by offering long-term support throughout their education, pathways into STEM and employability programmes and access to greater diversity and opportunity initiatives. A focus on developing an ongoing pipeline of graduates (or equivalent) alongside a vibrant apprenticeship programme will help to backfill the holes left by the ageing workforce.

Building viable skills pipelines is a long term endeavour and fraught with competition from a range of other engineering and non-engineering disciplines. Supporting schools, colleges and careers events will be an essential part of ensuring we have appropriate talent to maintain a robust field service. It will need focus, cross-company effort and funding alongside excellent relationships with academia and skills training providers.It will need focus, cross-company effort and funding alongside excellent relationships with academia and skills training providers.

Speak with Leadent

Getting it right - doing the right thing for users, and our clients in all senses, is key to our approach at Leadent.

It'd be great to talk to you if you think that philosophy applies to you too. Leadent is proud to have designed and delivered training for a range of market leading mobile workforce management solutions. We have trained technical teams, solution implementers and partners to gain better technical and business knowledge in implementing mobile work management tools. Get in touch with us to find out more.