Dissatisfaction and short-lived success – too many generic skills are to blame.

The superiority of technical skills.

When I started as a manager in an auto company, I looked at all the company training catalogs and asked my boss what I needed to learn. It appeared that training in compliance, customer experience design, presentation and leadership skills were necessary for career advancement. I realized that my colleagues had attended identical courses. As a result, I decided that these courses would be useful and effective for my career.

Consequently, I thought that learning general skills was better than training technical skills. Moreover, since that was what the HR department saw as the skills in demand, their training portfolio included general courses rather than technical training for employees like me. 

But that's wrong.

To be clear, the steepest learning curve I experienced was when we inspected a panel van on a cherry picker to look for spot welds to find out how the competition designed this van. That was useful because I actually learned something practical about cars and technology.

Everyone wants to make a meaningful contribution and earn a good salary. But what does it take to make a valuable contribution?

In the automotive industry, it's frighteningly simple: technical skills are required to contribute to value-adding processes such as vehicle development, production and sales. The more relevant an employee's skills are to getting a car on the road, the more valuable and respected they become. Therefore, the order of skill needs in the automotive industry should be as follows: Technical skills come first, followed by general skills.

Each employee needs to understand what the employer needs most. Superior technical skills are fundamental to the financial sustainability of any automotive company. Therefore, technical skills training is always mandatory. General skills training can only be seen as an optional extra.

And this is increasingly true today.

The technical core of the automotive industry is being torn out and a new technical core is being implanted.

This restructuring puts the training of technical knowledge and skills under a magnifying glass: the problem becomes even more visible and the heat increases at the same time.

The electrification and digitalization of the car is rapidly changing all core processes, and the demand for employees with technological skills in artificial intelligence, software and battery technology is very high.

I saw with my own eyes how the training of employees in the offices of car manufacturers in technical skills was the lowest priority. And could hardly believe it. As I advanced my career beyond day-to-day operations, I couldn't get my hands on any quality technical training related to my employer's core processes. I realized that in this environment, my value as an employee was diminishing.

So I threw in the towel.

The cowboys who don't ride.

Companies with good cash flow are adding management levels.

In other words, they put extra chess pieces on the board to win the game.

This is straight out of a management playbook, as a manager's job is to figure out how to adapt operations to new markets or technologies. But inevitably, in their new role, these managers themselves need new technical skills and a better understanding...which they don't have.

This leads to a paradoxical Catch-22 situation from which managers cannot escape.

This phenomenon is not unique to the automotive industry. I spoke to a friend who works for a medium-sized software company. The company has been creating ERP systems as its main business for more than a decade. It employs 700 programmers who write the code - that's the core process of a software company. But the total number of employees is 6,000, which raises the question: do all employees contribute to the company's value creation?

Elon Musk has caused a stir in the industry by laying off more than 50% of the Twitter workforce. Most of the employees did not have the necessary technical skills to run Twitter. Twitter's technical department was asked which of them had reviewed the code within the last 4 weeks. It turned out that less than 50% had reviewed the code. An engineer in a software company who is not involved in code development has inevitably turned into a generic manager.

In all these companies, the pyramid between generalists and experts has inverted.

In the weeks that followed, the tech industry followed suit and laid off more than 60,000 employees. And this trend has already left the confines of the tech industry: FedEx has laid off 10% of its executives.

Without irreplaceable technical skills, an employee's contribution to a technology-driven company shrinks.

My decision in 2019 may have been premature, but my reasoning was correct.

Rebalancing the pyramid.

Every wave from the United States eventually makes its way to the shores of Europe.

The inverted pyramid is the result of high-performing companies that tend to add layers of management in response to new challenges. Following this logic, tens of thousands of well-paid management positions have been created in the automotive industry over the last fifteen years since the 2008 financial crisis.

The automotive industry continued to grow and reached its peak in 2019.

Then came the pandemic. Factories remained closed and shortages of microchips reduced subsequent production ramp-ups. Production output declined. The high-end vehicles that were still rolling off the production line were able to achieve higher prices and profits, giving manufacturers another record year.

But the tide is turning.

More experts are needed. Management levels are being put to the test.

The battle for technical skills is on.

A new mix of technical experts.

Names like Watt, Edison, Tesla, Ford, Zuse, Gates and Jobs are synonymous with significant technological advances in certain industries. Time will tell whether Elon Musk represents such a technological revolution in the global automotive industry.

In any case, the automotive industry needs a new mix of tech talent.

It took the automotive industry a century to learn how to build cars. Similarly, in this decade, it needs to familiarize itself with battery packs, car software and artificial intelligence for driving.

New entrants from the tech industry must learn "car", such as product lifecycles and platforms, supplier logics, industrialization of vehicle production or servicing and supplying the fleet in the field.

This learning process is crucial for competition.

Let me explain.

At one point, I was assigned to the product development committee, which met weekly to discuss issues around new cars in the product process. All my colleagues were the best, the most experienced designers, engineers and managers. The team's mission was to convert the company's entire product portfolio to vehicles with the lowest possible emissions and to turn the company around.

The team was outstandingly successful. And here's why.

All of the team members on the committee were respected beyond the organization for their expertise. They all advanced in their careers because they had acquired specific knowledge as they successfully completed important projects. If there was unused technology, a new component or a new functionality to be discovered, the domain expert researched it with his team and presented the results to the rest of the team.

Decision-making was fast and effective. Some of the cars developed during this time are still blockbusters, especially on European roads.

From time to time we ran into a wall.

The arguments for investing in technical training are there.

The team thought one problem was unsolvable: software and electronics. The associated department grew within a few months, but the integration problems remained. The same thing happened here as with the software company I mentioned earlier, Twitter or FedEx.

Traditional OEMs have struggled with software and electronics. On the one hand, this is due to conventional automotive technology and engineering architecture. On the other hand, software processes collide with OEM decision-making processes. Managers struggle in both situations and strive to become experts in automotive software.

The glaring lack of technical training for employees does not make things any better.

Therefore, any investment in technical skills training in the automotive industry has a great return by improving the contribution of managers and employees to the organization's value creation.

"We have no choice but to get serious technical training," Henry Ford declared in 1920. "We may lose a skilled worker to other companies, but if we don't train them in the first place, we lose twice."

What better time than now for a new culture of blended experts and a historic wave of technical training in the automotive industry?