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We are immersed in general knowledge but starved for crucial technical knowledge in the automotive industry. Knowing this, I quit my career in the automotive industry to start a learning advisory firm.
The superiority of technical skills.
When I started out as a manager in a car company, I studied all the corporate training catalogues and asked my boss for the best learning sources. I concluded that training in compliance, customer experience design, presentation, and leadership abilities are necessary for career advancement. I also discovered that my coworkers had taken identical classes. As a result, I decided that these courses are useful and effective for my career.
Consequentially, I considered learning generic skills more preferable to technical skill training. Furthermore, because HR was reacting to this demand, its training portfolio included more generic courses rather than technical skill training for white-collar workers, like me.
But this is wrong.
To be clear, the steepest learning curve I encountered was when we inspected a panel van on a lifting platform, seeking for welding spots to discover how the competition constructed this van. This was useful because I actually learned something practical about automobiles and technology.
Individual contribution amidst the automotive transformation.
Everyone wants to make a meaningful contribution in addition to a good salary.
But what does it take to contribute?
In the car industry, this is shockingly simple: technical skills are required to contribute to the most valuable operations, like car engineering, production, and sales. The more relevant an employee’s skills are for bringing a car on the road, the more valuable and respected the employee becomes. Thus, the order of skill-needs in the automotive industry should be as follows: technical skills come first, followed by generic skills.
Indeed, any employee must first understand what the employer needs most. And then tailor their skills accordingly, because superior technical skills are fundamental to any car company’s financial sustainability. Therefore, technical skill training is always the main dish, while generic skill training can be seen as just the desert.
And this is becoming increasingly true today.
The dual transformation in the automotive industry packs technical training under a lens that makes the problem even more visible while raising the heat. Since all core processes are changing rapidly due to the electrification and digitization of the car, the demand for new technical skills comes on top.
Employees with technological skills in artificial intelligence, software, and battery technology are in high demand.
However, I witnessed how technical skill training for office workers remained the lowest priority. As I advanced my career away from the sales floor, I could not get my hands on high-quality technical skill learning concerning the core processes of my employer. I became conscious of how my value as an employee diminished.
Thus, I threw in the towel.
The cowboys who do not ride horses.
Innovative technologies cause companies with good cash flow to add management levels.
In other words, they put extra chess pieces on the board to win the game.
This is straight out of a managerial playbook as a manager’s job is to discover how to adjust operations to new circumstances. If a company enters a new market, a manager is assigned to this task. The same happens when technology changes business. But inevitably, these managers require new technical skills themselves on their new assignment … which they do not have.
This leads to a paradoxical catch-22 situation in which the managers cannot escape.
Surprisingly, this phenomenon is not only known to the car industry: I was talking about this with a friend who works for a mid-sized software company. For more than a decade, the principal business has been the creation of ERP systems. The company has 700 programmers who write code – which is the core process of a software company. But the total number of employees is 6,000, which raises the question: are all employees contributing to the company’s value creation?
Another example: Elon Musk sent shock waves through the industry by sacking more than 50% of Twitter’s workforce. The shocking insight is that most of the workforce did not cover the critical technical skills to operate Twitter. Twitter’s engineering department was asked about which of them had checked the code within the last 4 weeks. It turned out, less than 50% had checked code. An engineer at a software company who is not involved in the code development might have transformed into another generic manager.
In all these companies, the expert-versus-generalist pyramid has flipped.
In the weeks that followed, the tech industry echoed this insight by laying off more than 60,000 employees. And this trend has left the confines of the tech industry already: FedEx laid off 10% of its officers.
Without irreplaceable tech skills, an employee’s contribution in a technology-driven organization shrinks.
And looking back on my decision in 2019, I may have quit early, but my reasoning was correct.
Rebalancing the pyramid.
Each wave from the United States finally makes its way to Europe’s shores.
The inverted pyramid is a result of cash-rich businesses tending to add management levels as response to new challenges. In this logic, tens of thousands of well-paying managing jobs have been created in the automotive industry in the last fifteen years after the 2008 financial crisis.
The car industry was still growing and peaked in 2019.
Then the pandemic struck. Factories remained closed, and the supply of microchips was depleted. Production output fell. However, the high-end vehicles still rolling off the assembly lines may earn far higher prices and profits, saving the day.
But the tides are turning.
More experts are required. Management levels are under scrutiny.
The battle for technical skills is on.
A new blend of technical experts.
Names like Watt, Edison, Tesla, Ford, Zuse, Gates, and Jobs represent significant technological advances in specific industries. Time will tell whether Elon Musk represents such a technological revolution in the global automobile industry.
In any case, the automotive sector needs a new blend of technical professionals.
As the car industry took over a century to learn how to build cars, it must also spend this decade learning about battery packs, car software, and artificial intelligence for driving. New hires from the tech business, for example, must learn automotive-specific skills, such as how to scale up plants.
This learning process cannot be underestimated.
Let me explain.
Once, I was assigned to the product engineering commission, which met weekly to discuss issues surrounding new cars in the product process. All my peers were the best, the most senior designers, engineers, and managers. The team mission was to shift the entire product portfolio of the company to cars with the lowest emissions possible, and to turn the company around.
The team was outstandingly successful. And here is why.
All team members of the committee were respected beyond the organization for their domain expertise. All progressed in their careers because they had acquired specific knowledge as they passed key projects successfully. If there was unused technology, a new component, or a new functionality to be discovered, the domain expert would research this with his team and present the findings to the rest of the team.
Decision making was swift and effective. Some of the cars developed in this period are still blockbusters, especially on European roads.
From time to time, we ran into a wall.
The case for investing in technical training has arrived.
One problem was deemed unsolvable by the team: software and electronics. The associated department grew in a matter of months, yet integration challenges persisted. The same thing happened here as it did at the software company I mentioned earlier, Twitter, or FedEx.
Traditional OEMs have struggled with software and electronics up until now. On the one hand, this is due to conventional automotive technology and engineering architecture. On the other hand, software processes clash with OEM decision-making procedures. Managers are struggling in both situations, striving to become automotive software experts.
The glaring lack of technical skill training for white-collar employees does not improve matters.
Thus, every investment in technical skill training in the automotive industry has a big return by improving the contribution of managers and staff to the organization’s value creation.
“We have no choice but to do serious technical training,” Henry Ford declared in 1920. “We may lose a skilled person to other companies, but if we do not train them at all, we lose twice.”
Is there a better time than now for a new culture of blended experts and a historic wave of tech skill training in the automotive industry?
TL;DR
- Generic skills training is popular since management is the most likely career route.
- The pyramid has inverted, and the task of repairing this has only recently begun.
- As a result, the demand for technical skill training is expanding.
- The benefits of such training are enormous.
