So much is being said about industry 4.0, about new technologies and professions, about government incentives, etc. … that we tend to underestimate the basic, current and practical problems with which we as producers are directly faced on a daily basis. The factory of the future will be fully automatic, self-sufficient and integrated but the work of humans will always be required and there will be an increasing need for specialist figures.
And in the meantime?
In the meantime, as I have already commented on in the past, we manufacturers are making a huge effort to find specialist technical personnel.
A few responses to last week’s post reminded me of an episode that goes back to around a decade ago when the then far-sighted mayor of our municipality (Buccinasco, Milan) proposed a meeting with local companies to understand what were the most common issues and to evaluate if and what the public administration could do for them.
There was a good attendance and various companies from the mechanical sector in fact highlighted the difficulty in finding technical personnel. In response, the mayor arranged a meeting with the principals of the 5-6 schools in the area to discuss the matter and half of the colleges involved took part. From the meeting two points became clear:
The number of students enrolled in the higher technical engineering institutes was continuing to fall (as most opted for high school); many mechanics students also seemed unmotivated, probably because their choice fell on technical institutes, mainly in the hope of finding less challenging schools.
In an effort to encourage and cultivate the more motivated youths, we manufacturers offered to host students periodically and for all the years of school (therefore from the first to the fifth) in order to show them our activities, equipment and processes, also supporting them in the choice of specialization. Our proposal was unfortunately voted down because, the principals pointed out to us, there were insufficient economic resources to underwrite all the insurance required for the youths.
I believe that today, the situation is even worse with regard to enrolments but that in the meantime the initiative relating to school-work alternation paths (when performed seriously, and unfortunately this is not always the case) can make a positive contribution.
An important fact is that the most committed and willing mechanics students find work within a few months of graduation, even before the end of school. Unfortunately they are also many who instead see in the school-work alternation paths an opportunity to skip a few weeks of school…
