Imagine that we find ourselves in this scenario: our company is experiencing a time of strong growth such that – among other matters to address – it is also necessary to increase the workforce as quickly as possible.
The Big Crisis of recent years has left us with a physiological need to ponder even more prudent investments to be made but while in the case of purchasing machinery we have more tangible and concrete elements available on which to base our evaluations, when it comes to persons, we still rely very much on our own instincts.
On this blog we have already the difficulty of finding specialist technical personnel many times: on the one hand, deciding to take on young newly qualified mechanical experts also means contemplating the fact that – at least in our direct experience – it takes approximately ten years on average for these people to be able to work completely autonomously; which will also therefore have related costs. On the other hand, instead we must be aware that people who are highly specialist and already expert in a specific market niche (as for example the sector of precision micromechanics in which MICROingranaggi operates might be), and therefore able to be operational immediately, are extremely difficult to find, in addition to which they are – also in this case – expensive.
This is an issue that affects many companies in our country and it can also often be due to a slowdown in business growth.
The Ministry of Economic Development has announced that in the package ‘Impresa 4.0’ – phase two of the Development Plan being implemented by the Government regarding Industry 4.0 – a tax credit will also be made available for digital training (and will probably be 50% of the company’s expenses intended for this purpose). This is undoubtedly a positive signal, but it is – at the moment – only being offered for skills relating to the technologies that meet the requirements set out in the Government plan relating to Industry 4.0.
This means that finding specialist technical personnel still remains a practical difficulty for us as producers which is combined with another critical issue:
often evaluating in advance the actual level of skills of a specialist worker is extremely complex.
It is an issue that applies to many sectors and that definitely also affects our own. When in fact we happen to find personnel who already have a high level of specialisation precisely in our specific field, there still remains the difficulty of evaluating this professional beforehand because,
in addition to the technical skills, the working method will also be taken into account: each person, in fact, customises and operates in a work context as they see fit and based on their own former experiences.
That of the working method in particular is a subject that – compared to the past – concerns us much less. In fact, we used to place much more emphasis on the working mode of a person that we were taking on, but today – after having established and tested our own method and therefore after having verified that it works – we want people who work for us to adopt it right away. It goes without saying then that if once put into practice, someone had improvements to propose dictated by their own personal experience, we will be happy to evaluate them. But that, in my opinion, would be at a later stage…
What do you think of that statement? And what do you do to assess the level of skills of a specialist worker before hiring them?
Articoli correlati:
The number of mechanics students is falling and, consequently, also specialist technical personnel
Companies are looking for personnel and not finding them yet unemployment is high. Why is this?
Is the repositioning of highly qualified staff is a real problem?
When even Italian companies used to have in-house schools…
