The automotive manufacturing industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation, evolving into digital, mechanical, and energy powerhouses that rely on highly interconnected systems. This shift demands bold investments in cutting-edge technology, revamped production facilities, and new supply chains—along with specialized talent to make it all happen.
Watch our webinar with The Josh Bersin Company as they unveil the groundbreaking insights from their most recent research from the Global Workforce Intelligence Project, developed in collaboration with Eightfold.
Kathi Enderes and Stella Ioannidou will dive into:
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from industry experts and gain actionable insights to implement within your own organization.
00:01
Josh, hello and thank you for joining today’s webinar. We’re excited to have the Josh Bersin Company joining us today to share their latest research on the automotive manufacturing industry from the Global Workforce Intelligence project powered by Eightfold AI. If you have any questions during today’s webinar, please put them in the chat located at the bottom of your console, and if you experience any technical difficulties, you can also place those in the chat, and our team will help troubleshoot with that. I’ll pass it over to our speakers, Kathi Enderes and Stella loannidou.
Kathi Enderes 00:36
Thank you, and welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us. We have a great hour for you, and we’d love to take your questions as we go along. What we’ll do is we’ll do a little bit of intro and and basically, I’ll introduce myself, and then I’ll look for Stella to introduce herself, and then we’ll go through the agenda, and then we’ll take it from there. So Kathy Andrews, the Senior Vice President of Research and Global Industry Analyst at the Josh Bersin Company. I’m originally from Austria, if you’re detecting an accent, I live in California now. I’ve lived there for quite some time, and my background is before I joined Josh and the team a few years ago, I worked both in management consulting for about 10 years, and then as a practitioner leader in large organizations as well. And then the last few years, have been doing and leading research and and also looking at kind of the vendor side of HR. So really excited to talk with you. Stella, over to you. Just quick intro. Hello, everyone, Stella, I need to hear the weird surname that sells all Greek to you. Exactly that senior director of research here at the Josh Bersin Company, overseeing our research around all the nerdy stuff, around skills AI and talent intelligence. Very excited to share with you the deep dive that we conducted on the automotive manufacturing industry, which we hope that it will serve as a great example for any one of you, regardless of which industry you are, we totally feel that what we’re going to be discussing today is totally transferable to how Organizations overall understand and apply the skills of the talent intelligence practices in their lives. So let’s kick this off. Kathi, shall we’ll jump right in. So the way that we’re going to talk about it is, I’ll give you just a brief overview of why we’re even talking about this, how this fits into the overall business context, just not specific to the automotive industry. And then Stella is going to dive much deeper into all the insights that we got specifically about the automotive manufacturing industry. And it’s going to be a thrill. I’ve heard Kathi talk about it. You’ll learn a lot, whether you’re in the automotive industry or not, so it’s going to be great. And then we’ll talk a little bit about what this means for you, maybe taking a step back and and thinking about how this could apply to any other industry as well. And then I will get to your Q&A’s and but if you have great questions, just put them in the chat as we talk about too, and we can address them as as we go along as well. Okay, so with that, I’ll jump right in, because I know we have lots, lots of ground to cover. So just as like taking a big step back and thinking about what’s happening in the world of work and in the world of
03:34
kind of organizations, we have really for big themes that are hitting every organization we’re talking with in a big way. The first one is, is this ongoing and ever getting worse? If that’s a word, labor shortage. So that enduring labor shortage, where it’s harder, harder and harder to Oh, I think you can’t see me anymore. I don’t know what happened. Sorry. My video, I think, has gone blank, so maybe try to, I don’t know what’s happening, sorry.
04:08
Oh, good. We can see you. Though. We can see he. We can hear you well, though,
04:22
okay, I think now I’m back. Yes, now you’re back. Yeah. Okay, great. Thanks for letting me know. Yeah, it was just a black screen. I just refreshed the screen. Sorry about that.
04:33
Okay, so I was talking about the labor shortages. So every company that we know is is like really challenged to find the right people, find the right skills. So just hiring to grow the company and to do what you need to do in the company just doesn’t work anymore. So you have to think much more about how do we focus on productivity, work, redesign and just different ways of thinking about everything that we’re doing in HR the.
05:00
Skill based approaches, of course that Stella mentioned already a little bit that fit into that too, because used to be that we could just find kind of the people that had already done the job before. But if you don’t have enough people, you have to think about people that might not have done exactly that job, but maybe they have skills from other areas that are kind of adjacent or kind of useful for what you need them to do, especially when industries change, a lot like the automotive industry as well. We’ll hear from Stella about so that’s the first theme. The second theme is organizations themselves are changing to organizations used to be very hierarchical, very static, but with the world of work changing so fast, with every industry changing and converging with other industries, as we’ll talk about too, most work happens actually, not in organizational kind of silos, but in teams and connective teams. And so that forces us to think about our organization and in a different way, and thinking about also about our structure, but then also how we are thinking about careers and talent mobility and performance management and compensation and everything work, of course, where and how people work as well.
06:15
All of that is is changing in a big way too, and we see this as kind of a dynamic organizations as well.
06:24
The third theme is about AI and of course, AI is entering every aspect of the company we have AI and HR. Of course, that’s a big theme. But then also, how does AI impact every job that we have in the organization, every kind of organization model. What do we need to do in terms of upscaling people and re skilling them in order to use AI in an effective way? So all of this impacts us and our roles in HR as well. And then last theme has to do with employees. So employees are looking for more. Employee expectations are changing a lot. Now employees really want to be much more engaged, much more involved, much deeper into the organizational decisions on anything from how they work, where they work, with tools they use, but then also what skills they can apply, what skills they amplify, and even strategic decisions on what products do we bring to the market, or how do we support our customers in the best way? We call this moving from employee experience to what we call employee activation. So all of these things factor in there. And I see actually a question from Eddie, and there’s a great question, where the skill based hiring a line here, upscaling recently so critical as well. And you’ll see actually our in a little bit Absolutely, we have actually a framework around, like all of these components, which we call it for our framework for ours, because it’s for us, it will, it will fit in in a minute. But I think that the big the answer to that question is it fits kind of everywhere, right? Skill, this hiring fits kind of everywhere. Upskilling, reskilling, redesigning the jobs, retaining the right skills. Fits through all of these because with labor shortage, cause you to do this, but your organization needs to be ready for it too, to be much more dynamic, much more skill based, break open these kind of rigid silos of this is the job, and think much more about the skills that people have as well, and still is going to talk much more about that too, and specifically to the Automate motive industry as well. Great question. We see this as a different age altogether, and I’ll just walk you through how these ages kind of evolved over time, in kind of in media, over 100 years ago, basically, we were in the agrarian age where this was mostly all the businesses were reforms, and maybe all companies, maybe shipping firms that kind of
08:52
just produced kind of goods and then ship them around. And companies lasted very long, and people lived very short, and you had enough people, basically, and you were not really thinking about talent as kind of a critical factor in the success of your company. And then the Industrial Revolution came around, and we said a while to add double, like to make maybe double the output. We don’t just need to add twice the people, because now we have machines too, right? So then the machines came around and said, Oh, we had to train people on how to use the machines. And still, companies live rather long, and people didn’t live very long, because that was kind of over 100 years ago too. And then, of course, in the 1970s computers came around in a big way, not just for kind of,
09:44
really everybody. And that was the time when we said data is the new oil and all that, and when we thought about kind of the war for skills, or the war for talent. But the war for talent at that time was really mostly about tech talent. So we said, well, these tech.
10:00
People, the tax bills are really kind of what makes the breaks the company. And from an executive perspective, the CIO was kind of the most important executive, and the agrarian agent, industrial agent was the CFO. And now we call this the intelligence age in the like since, really the advent of AI in a big way,
10:21
and the labor shortages and all of the things that I talked about before, really cause the company to be much more talent centric and much more culture centric. So it’s much the success of the company is much more tied to your ability to attract the right talent, to retain the right talent, to use that skills to create the right culture, and companies last much shorter than people live now, of course, that the average company now last only the average 4500 company really only last 1015, years, versus people live into the 90s. The world work well into the 60s or even 70s. So people, of course, go to many, many different companies. So it changes also the nature of the careers, and then the CHRO is really in the middle of all of this. So the CHRO becomes the most important C suite executives. And we heard that actually, I was just attending and listening to a CEO panel a couple of weeks ago where all of the CEOs of these very large companies that are most important, my most important right and person is no longer the CIO or the CFO. It’s really the theater role, because our ability to to create success for the company is restricted by our ability to get the right talent the right culture. So it’s a really exciting area at the same time, and with AI, of course, productivity has skyrocketed. So productivity, it gets bigger and bigger and faster and faster. You see this kind of almost exponential curve, how much AI and technology actually supported our productivity enhancements. And what that means, of course, for us in HR is we have all of these employees that we could call super, super human. So we could really think about, how do we power all of these employees with the skills and with the ability and with the training and with kind of the right culture and with the leadership capabilities to create those super powered humans. And what that means for us in HR is everything in HR is now connected. So everything that we do, it used to be that we said, well, everything that we do in HR fits into one of the need buckets. It’s hiring, it fits to the recruiting side. If it’s learning, it fits to the L&D team. If it’s something that’s related to compensation, that total rewards team will do that. But now everything connects with everything else, and that means, basically we in HR need to kind of think about how we integrate all of these things. We call this systemic HR, where we move beyond the organizational silos in HR and think about the HR function as a whole, working, for example, on the labor shortage, that connects to hiring, but then also, of course, to work, plus planning and leadership development, that the right having the right skills, and how you create the right culture and how you manage talent and mobility, on and on and on. So all of these things are really interconnected. Here’s where we go with the with this, the question, actually, that we had before from Eddie, about where still, this hiring fits in. Well, if you think about skill based hiring, but you think about also hiring and recruiting overall. In labor constrained world, recruiting alone is no longer enough, right? It used to be. You could recruit your way out of kind of any talent shortage that doesn’t work anymore. We’ve done many studies, many industry studies, one of them, for example, on health care, we saw they have a massive gap in the clinical population, in the nurses specifically, and so just trying to recruit them just doesn’t work anymore. So while you can broaden the talent pool with skill based recruiting, you also have to think about how you at the same time, look at the skill set and also retain the people that you already have. How can you re skill at the same time up skill, re skill, help people have talent mobility and move them into adjacent skills, adjacent roles, move them around. Use talent marketplaces, for example, to help them work on projects or on opportunities or find mentors, and at the same time, also redesign jobs and work models. And employment models use automation, use AI, so you need less of the skills that you have not don’t don’t have enough of so in the health care organized health care study that we did actually also with with eight fold. Couple of years ago, we found out that the redesign element is actually the biggest leverage point of all of them, because there you could close almost 50% of that gap that you had in the clinical populations by just needing less people. And.
15:00
In the nursing roles, thinking about, how can we use many contractors or gig workers, or maybe do internal gig work, or use AI so we have more productivity and need less of that kind of hard to find skill set. And Stella will explain us, of course, how this works, also in the in the automotive industry as well. So it’s, it’s really an interesting way of looking at that from a from a technology perspective, AI is, of course, here to stay. You see all these little, little squares here that we read squares where we say, AI is impacting everything that we do in the whole talent and HR technology stack, used to be that you basically had the transactional systems at the bottom where you said, these are the ATS system, the HCM system, the LM, S, the LSP, all of these kind of transactional systems, and they were kind of static and just basically not databases, in a way. They were not really designed for interfacing with employees or with managers or with candidates, that one more design for each other people. But now you all of these systems also are infiltrated with AI in the middle here you have kind of what we call that intelligence layer, where we get talent intelligence from your own kind of systems, but then also from outside systems, from databases outside of the company, from job matching, from mentoring, performance management, any of those kind of things. Skills, of course, skills ontology, skills taxonomies, but then learning assessments, all of that, basically. And that middle layer, that AI, talent intelligence layer, gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more important, because really these ei based systems and age all this is one of them is is really operating in a completely different way than the transactional systems, because their data systems so that their strength is really much more about the data. And then on top, have you have our employees and managers and candidates access the systems, and that’s being disrupted by AI as well. So the I heard last week, when it was at a big conference, somebody said the new AI is the new UI. So basically, AI is the UI, and that’s really what’s happening now, because now you have generate API that’s coming into play there too, for people just to ask a question, rather than to navigate those screens. So all of this is happening, of course, in this market, in this area, and from an organizational perspective. Let me talk a little bit about that too, before I turn it over to Stella.
17:34
Every industry is actually merging with another industry. So it used to be that, basically, we thought about digital adoption as kind of a one dimensional thing. When the internet came about, we said, well, we need to bring all of our systems online, and we need to create these kind of online shopping portals or something like that. But then we said, Wow, this is actually really changing also how our company operates. So we need to do a kind of a digital transformation, and then with, I think, up to the pandemic, we said, Wow, we need to really bring all of our things online. We need to create new models of people to engage with us without even being having to to have interface with any person, in person, in the in the pandemic, because we said, it’s too dangerous. And we can do it. And now we’re seeing every industry actually being disrupted by, kind of the digital and the AI, and every industry also converging with another industry. And this is, this is a model that we came up with as well. We call this industry reinvention, where we say, used to be that you were in kind of each of your industries in your silos, and you said, Okay, I’m a retail company. And know exactly what that means. These are the roles, these are the skills. These are these are operating models, but your retail company now you also have to go into maybe pharmacy and healthcare and financial services, if you think about Walgreens or target, for example. And that happens with every industry as well. And Stella’s going to talk about the auto industry, so I’m not going to talk about that now, but every industry you see this kind of highlighted. Every company, of course, now is also a tech company. And so from a people and talent perspective, you’re competing with every other industries to be that you said, Okay, I’m in retail, and my competitiveness, from a talent perspective, I only the region, other retail companies, but now you’re competing with all the tech companies, you’re competing with healthcare companies, you’re competing with banking, and that happens with every industry. So it’s very challenging for us, I think, in HR, to to keep up with that. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to do here, to demystify that and see how does it impact your industry? And we’ll talk about that gray one in a minute. So I think Stella, I’ll turn it over to you to talk about, first a little bit about the global workforce intelligence project, and then what we learned in the auto industry.
19:53
Yeah, great. Sue. Thank you, Cassie. And when we started the global workforce intelligence series, we said.
20:00
Oh, these are going to be our industry deep studies. We’re going to be focusing on one industry figuring out what’s going on with the talent there. What is the biggest business challenge, and how do you solve that with skills, and what are the most prevalent talent challenges? And to to Kathi’s point, we went there. We always rely on the eight full talent intelligence platform to give us data around skills, but we also have expert review panels, and we have discussions with C-Suite experts and executives from each of the industry that we’re researching at the time, and we do a series of analysis this example. This is an example from our banking study, right? What are the job roles? What does the job cluster look like? What are the skill dynamics? Which skills are rising, which are declining? And interestingly enough, having published and researched, I think, five industries with automotive, it becomes clearer and clearer that the initial idea that we’re going to be doing a deep dive on one industry. Silo is actually not exactly what we’re fighting because there is no clear boundary between the industries. Everyone is taking a little bit of something from their peers, and everyone is competing with everyone else, especially if you looked at talent competition from the skills lens, like the role links, what type of talent do they are they looking for? What type of skills are they looking to hire? And we’re going to be publishing a lot more in the coming future. But we’ve seen this same pattern play out in healthcare, in consumer banking, consumer packaged goods, in pharma and in automotive. But let’s double click, you know, into automotive for today, because this is for the sake of the argument today, right? So automotive, when, when I started, you know, and when the team started working on automotive, I thought, Oh, this is like a STEM talent discussion, right? This is where we’re talking about just in time manufacturing. This is where we’re talking about the traditional Ford market, for model of, you know, design and car production. This is about engineering. This is about but what we actually found out was it’s turning into a more complex and more nuanced story, and very greatly impacted by the industry strategic shift into the EV landscape. And don’t get me wrong, there’s still some STEM talent needed for the move from internal combustion engines to EV. But there’s also additional things that come to play and are now top of mind for automotive manufacturers, because they’re not just looking to, you know, kind of transition from internal combustion to EV. They’re actually transitioning the whole business model. It’s not about building a great car as fast and with as few defects as possible. It’s more about how do we create excellent driving and transportation experiences for consumers and where that comes from. That also means additional digitally enabled experiences. This means literally being giving people the ability to select, to customize our card and to even, you know, don’t have to go to a dealership anymore. Maybe I don’t want to go to a dealership anymore. I went from the comfort of my PC or my mobile phone to browse through and kind of get my car ordered and set up. This is more of a this a dramatic shift on the entire business model, because we’re transitioning to a as a service model from the traditional, you know, you build in, you demonstrated, and someone comes, you were talking about steamless direct sale, which is a big step for most automotive manufacturers to
24:16
to take. And on top of that, because we’re working about, we’re talking about EV. There is, of course, automotive is no stranger to safety measures and quality standards, but now there is additional protocols around safety and security of the EV ecosystem, which is completely different to what we were building and what we were challenged with, or what we’re thinking
24:40
in the, let’s say, the in the traditional internal combustion engine. So we have everything we had in the terms of the regulations we were already supporting, and then we add an additional all about the EV ecosystem, about how do we charge the the cars? How do they communicate? What’s the topology? How do we.
25:00
Make this safe. How do we make sure that everything works seamlessly? And most automotive manufacturers are not clear about if they have a strong preference, like they’re not going all in the EV transformation, they’re keeping one part of the business creating, like manufacturing the traditional cars, and another one working on the EV so imagine how this multiplies the complexity of all the teams having to play both ways of the equation in parallel and bringing them to the market in a seamless way. And on top of that, we want to create amazing digital experiences. We want to make sure that, hey, I need, like, eight cameras to show me what’s in front of me, what’s in the back, not just, you know, beep, beep and sounds when I park, but I actually want, can the park, can the car park itself? Right? So the automotive manufacturing challenges right now is about not just building great cars, it’s about building great computers on wheels, where they took the idea of designing and assembling and they play to their strength, they added the whole technology and data layer on top of that, creating smart and not just tech enabled, but also smart digital experiences. But this does not come easy, because this whole thing means that everything, everything changes, from the way cars work, from the way cars are built, from how we use cars, how we park cars, how we sell cars, and how the entire industry is regulated. So we were very surprised, for example, to to see, and we’ll see in a minute, how big of a shift that is for manufacturers, and how big, how big the shift in terms of the talent they’re looking to hire is actually turning to be
27:04
because we’re not talking about just great cars. We’re talking about high end mobility. We’re talking about automotive manufacturers understanding that they actually need new skills that translate into a competitive advantage. And we’re going to be seeing a bit what type of skills and what type of roles these are, and we’re going to be seeing why, and we’re going to you’re going to see the data around it why, the the automotive manufacturers who get this understand, and it’s the EV skills that are the transformation catalyst for them to embark and navigate this into this extremely complex market ecosystem.
27:45
You know, if you’ve followed any of our work, you know that we always try to not only demystify what is the biggest business challenge, but also what are the most successful players, let’s say in the industry, tackle it with skills in this particular industry, we found that most automotive manufacturers currently don’t really have the talent that they need to pivot swiftly into providing these EV and autonomous driving experiences for their consumers. Most of them are trying to. Are seeing the EV shift more like a project or like dominating part of the portfolio, they’re building separate plans or try to staff it, see how it goes. So this is where the majority of the players are right now. But what we saw that these automotive manufacturers who are forward looking, they’ve solved it. There are a better place in the market right now. They get it. We call these the pacesetters. Are those who understand two things. One, they need specific talent and skills to be on point that is clearly connected to gaining that competitive edge in the market. You can rely on what you knew to get you where you want to be. And the second thing is that you cannot take these types of decisions. Okay, what skills do I need to be an EV powered organization, for example, and offer great driving experiences? You can make those decisions on gut feeling or based on the skills that we used to have five years ago or 10 years ago, you actually need the data, the AI and the forecasting capability to understand, okay, which skills are declining. Where should I be investing? Should I be hiring for this skill and then re skill for the other what role should I be looking to her. What role should I be developing internally? And this is where talent intelligence plays in. One of the most fascinating things is, when we go into an industry, try to figure out, okay, let’s, let’s map out the lay of the land, what’s the current state of the roles and the skills in the interest industry?
30:00
And we use a taxonomy, you know, some colors. If you see the blue, it’s rising. If you see more of the red, it’s declining. And if you’re seeing a lot of charts, I’ve got to make things very easy for you, the red, the more red it becomes, the worse it gets. It means that these roles or skills are declining. And when we went to to the automotive industry, we saw that, hey, the automotive manufacturers actually understand that they need to up their game in terms of the people in software engineering, in IT and technology. If you see on the left, there are the roles, you see a lot of blue on the IT and technology, and you say, okay, so they understand that the ask here is to build greater tech enabled driving exercises. But if you double click on that and say, Okay, what is, what do the skills look like for those people in the IT and tech talent for automotive manufacturer, you’ll see all the red stuff, which means that they have the talent, but the skills of that talent are in declining skills. And what is declining skills? It’s actually a concept that we use to after seeing the time series of skills in the last 25 years, and say, How is this skill like gradually going up or down? If you and the eight full talent intelligence platform actually gives us this type of data, and you’ll see that, for example, in the tech talent, in automotive manufacturing, most of the skills there are actually declining. What does that mean for organization? Means that these skills that people have are not going to be relevant to you or the organization or the industry in the next three to five years. So you have people in this role, that one, you either need to upskill them or two, you either need to transfer them to different areas of the organization so that you’re leveraging the you know, you’re making the best of those skills that they’re having, and maybe you need to start thinking about bringing in a few more of the skills that are actually rising and are actually going to be significantly more impactful to the bottom line of the business. And this, sadly, this or not sadly, depends on how you look at it. This is a global challenge. Everyone in the automotive industry, regardless if you’re in the Americas, or if you’re in Europe, or if you’re anywhere in the world, there is so much demand for talent globally, and the specific talent that the automotive manufacturing industry is looking to tap into is anything and everything about
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software engineering, data engineering, robotics, AI, making the Manufacturing Processes smarter and also making the software solutions neater, cooler, more modern, more AI enabled. And if you’ve paid any attention to what Kathy was saying at the beginning, when she was describing, you know the market forces. What happens when there’s a huge demand for talent in some part or industry or some role, it means that if you’re trying to hire your way out of it, you’re tapping into a pool that all other players are also tapping in. So competition is fierce, and even after the especially after the POTUS executive order on EV cars sometime 2021,
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in the United States, we’ve seen that automotive manufacturers got the message. They said, Okay, we need to up our game in terms of the EV we need new skills. We need people in new roles. And the majority of them are trying to, as we say, hire their way out of their challenge. Or say, Okay, let’s increase salaries. Let’s try to bring in as much people as we can. But this is easier said than done, because interestingly, all the other industries tapping into the software talent pool, including and not limited to banking, aerospace, insurance,
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even CPG, right now, these are very hot roles. Try to, you know, try to hire for a software engineer or a data scientist nowadays. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t get me started on AI, unless you’re offering amazingly competitive salaries. It’s becoming really, really hard to, you know, to compete, especially in in the market right now, especially given the tech industry itself is the top choice for all the tech talent right now. And yes, we saw, you know, what type of skills they are prioritizing internally and how they are shifting the focus the automotive manufacturers to be more take enabled, be more agile, understand new products and how to develop them better. However, this is where things get really tricky for most automotive manufacturers. You know that here?
35:00
At the jobsperson company we conduct, we’re like the go to place for HR research, and we have deep dives and definitive guides on all the HR practices, recruitment, learning and development, retention, redesign. I’ll give you these all before, because these are the parts of the four hour framework that Kathy shared earlier. And because we have done these studies, we also have benchmarks and maturities for all the industries on all on each of these areas. So we, every time we do an industry study, we say, okay, so automotive manufacturing, they want to hire more of the tech and EV talent. How much do or, for example, they need to understand more how to transform their talent ecosystem, to better position themselves and be more more ready to offer these new tech enabled driving experiences. How mature are they in terms of leveraging these talent practices? How mature are they in recruitment, in retaining for the skills that they don’t want to lose, for re skilling internally, or for redesigning work so that, as Kathy said in the healthcare example earlier, they don’t need as much of that super hard to find talent, because they’re automating stuff and they’re redesigning and the sad news for the automotive manufacturing is that they’re below, let’s say average. When you compare them to where the market is at par. We say one is, you know, the least mature, and four is the most mature organizations. And as you will see on the green part, automotive manufacturing is still lagging in terms of how mature they are. To apply these advanced strategies around understanding which skills to hire for, which skills to develop internally, what areas of the organization to redesign so that we don’t, you know, emphasize so much on covering for roles or for skill that we can’t afford or they’re too, too hard to bring into the organization. And this is where it pays dividends to double click on the data and go back to the root cause and see what’s going on in the organization. We really need to understand what type of skills and what type of roles we have, where we stand, and what type of strategies we need to bring forth what type of roles, for example, should we be hiring for, and what if we cannot hire for that specific role or for that specific skill? What is the closest role we can tap into that’s going to be easier for us to upskill into the role that we need? Because if you actually run the numbers on that, maybe the business case is easier for the organization compared to increasing salaries by 40% year on year, as happened when the we crunched the numbers on the automotive industry. And we’re expect that, you know, automotive manufacturers expecting to cover all their needs through hiring, right? And as I said in the beginning, we always want to give
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you know the give our readers the opportunity to see what the leading organizations are doing. We call them the pacesetters. They say, okay, what are they doing differently in terms of the roles of their talent pool, in terms of the skills that they’re prioritizing. And we actually double clicked on the pacesetter automotive companies. And what do we mean by pacesetter? Let me just give you an asterisk there. We mean organizations who are not just great brands that you know them. We are talking about organizations who won financially. They’re amazing. They’re outperforming their peers, and, you know, they’re leading in the market. Two, they’re great places to work. They foster very successful, you know, workplaces and they’re distinguished and the on the talent practices that they adopt. Three, they they are acknowledged in their industry, not just saying financially, but they’re actually doing very well in terms of how they’re contributing to their industry and their innovative in their practices. There are the four things that we look for when we analyze for the pacesetters and in automotive manufacturing, pacesetter companies have significantly, and I mean significantly, this is the largest multiplayer we’ve seen so far. I think in all our GWI studies, significantly more people in quality roles compared to their non pacesetter counterpart. What that means, and it says, like 23 times more, which means, like, if you have one person in quality control, a pacer, automotive manufacturer, has 23 people on that specific role. It means that they take all those standards and security and quality,
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you know, constraints very seriously. They need to.
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Make sure that it works. Because if, for example, you’re building a great car that can park itself, it really needs to park itself without bumping anywhere, any place. And at the same time, it needs to abide by all the connectivity status, the sustainability standards, the green standards and all that. So they take quality very, very seriously. Another thing, of course, comes as no surprise, is that they have more people where they need them. So they have four, almost five times more people in software engineering roles. And because they are gradually adopting, or have already adopted, these direct
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to consumer models, they don’t need so many dealers. They don’t need they don’t need so many admin people, because people like me could go on their website and they can order what they want to order, and I don’t need to talk to administrative assistants or executive assistant or front desk receptionist for that matter. And I can schedule my appointments online, and they’ve automated a lot of that, let’s say back office admin roles in terms of the skills Pacer, companies in automotive have more people with the rising technology skills, the skill that that will help them create those next gen automotive driving experiences, robotics, of course, in terms of automating the production line, but also computer vision AI and be advanced skills that will help them build those computer on wheels and offer that internal experience that, hey you, you Know, you sit into a car and you actually see a computer screen that knows more about you and what you did last night, for example, that you or your spouse, right? Because it can tell a lot about hey, you logged off at that hour. Have you had your eight hours sleep? Maybe we should, you know, limit your speed for the day and like, take it easy, because maybe you haven’t had times rest. We’re talking about these types of experiences. But also, and this is something that we’ve seen in all pace center organizations, they don’t just focus on the tech skills, because that’s the good you know, that’s the skills of of the of the hour and the priority of now they’re focusing on having the people in the roles and the skills that will help the continuously rethink how things are being done in the organization. How can we transform the organization, and how can we design the experiments that we need, see the products, do our statistical data analysis and figure out, are we on the same track, or can we where do we need to steer the organization? How do we make things better and better and better and in also, they have significantly more people in with skills around
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HR, around teamwork, around sourcing, around recruitment. These are some of the most sophisticated, you know, sourcing
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organizations that we’ve seen in automotive manufacturing. And I know that a lot of people ask us, okay, who’s the best? Like, Tell us. Tell us a name. Give us, like the, you know, the one company to to dominate them all. But there is no such thing. There is in the same way that there is no silver bullet strategy, and that there is no one particular company that outperforms we, as in all our, you know, our studies, we gather interesting stories from pacesetter strategies being applied on each of the four Rs. For example, we’re seeing that, hey,
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there are players that have automated their entire production line, and it’s completely run by robots. You literally not see any human being there, right? Which is the the Tesla example, or you’ll find examples like Toyota, who is very well known for how they approach talent mobility and their career pathways and their skill their skilling programs internally, and for the record, the company who did build the first ever EV car, many years ahead of the competition because they combined their strength of just in time manufacturing to empowering that with technology. But we’re also seeing players like BMW who said, Okay, I have talent that is at a particular age group, for example, that is the average age is higher than my talent pool, and maybe I need to accommodate some micro adjustments in their daily work experience to maximize our productivity. And they accommodated, I think, more than 40 micro adjustments in.
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Uh, better seating and higher fonts and things like that, to still make sure that this part of the talent population was, uh, still feeling part and take, you know, taken care of in terms of the experience and maximizing their productivity. Of course, the list of stories goes on as I, as I said, we’ve done deep dives on all of the
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elements of the for our framework and recruitment, retention, re Skilling and redesign. But if there’s one thing I do want you to take out of this, and before I turn it over to Kathy to kind of, you know, wrap up the findings from all our studies so far is that this is a not a chro problem. This is not something that all the the chief people officer, the CHRO is going to be the one to solve it. When we’re talking about transformations at that scale, we’re talking about Sue collaboration. We’re talking about a CEO, for example, here, leading the transition to electric vehicles and the CHRO building, carving out a strategy alongside the CIO, the CFO and the operations to ensure that they’re hiring for the right talent and the right skills, but they’re also retaining the talent and the skills that are needed, and they are also redesigning the work to maximize productivity and make sure that they are using the appropriate operating and work models. And then on top of that is the technology layer that Kathi even showed at the microcosmos of the HR tech ecosystem to modernize the infrastructure and integrate AI and autonomous driving technologies to ensure that the experience that the top notch tech enabled experience is actually being provided in a safe and consistent way. Kathy, I want to turn it over to you to drive us home,
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because one of the things that we like to always remind people is like, how they can apply that to their industry, right? Because it’s not about the automotive industry in particular, it’s about the lessons that are transferable to all other industries, actually, because the underlying power. So the same, yeah, for sure, for sure, I’m still, my mind is still hung up on the car. Knowing me better than my spouse,
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it’s a little bit scary, so I’m thinking about that
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even tell me I didn’t sleep enough, but that you made me think seven. I’ll come back to how we how we go, yeah, well,
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you could do the same thing for your organization. So regardless if you are in automotive, which is great, and I know you’ve got so many good insights from Stella on where the automotive industry is going, specifically, and what the skills are, the roles are. And every time I listen to you, Stella, I hear something. I learned something new. But you could absolutely do the same thing for your organization, regardless where you are and which industry you are, because you for sure, have one of these challenge challenges, and you probably have all of that these challenge challenges in your organization. So you have skills gaps, right? Do you have specific skills gaps? We’re saying we’re missing specific skills in this. This case there was, there was the ED skills, of course, but there was also next generation tech skills in kind of health care. For example, we had like skills gaps in in specific, like, forward looking tech, like tech enabled health care, whatever it is, banking, have had also more skills gap in a digital area. These skills are changing really quickly. And so there, you have to change your talent mix in a way. You have to think about, how do we not just recruit and retain and reskill and redesign differently, but do we need to change what skills and what people we have in the organization overall, less of the old school and more of the new school. But then you, of course, we can’t just hire them. You have to think about the whole for our model. So you probably can think of skills gap that do you have in your organization? You might have enough people, but not the right skills. Second one is a capacity gap. So you literally don’t have enough people. Forget the skills, but you just don’t have enough people. That was health care and pharma, example, aware, for example, the health care has a huge nursing gap, farmers and already gap, for example, skills might not be changing so fast, they’re changing somewhat. And there you have to think about, how do we decrease the demand for talent to begin with, because you can like re skilling won’t work because you just don’t have enough people, right? Re skilling is not enough, so you have to think more about the redesign, or do we have a misalignment? So we have enough people, we have the right things, the right skills, but maybe people are not right working on the most important projects, most important.
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Areas. So the skills might not change too much. We call this skills velocity. Might not be too much. It’s pretty stable. Here, you can think about, how do we align the work? How do we prioritize the work? How do we move them the work and help people to focus on what’s most, most important here? So think about all of these three different areas. I’m sure you can think about talent groups, where you have each of these problems, and then you can think about, how do we solve them? And recruiting is part of the story, of course, but it can’t be the only, the only story by any of these just because you just don’t have enough people. Well, from a from an HR perspective, what does it think? What does it mean for us in HR? So we have to think about this HR system where kind of we don’t just operate in our silos. We just say, well, recruiting is just hiring people, and learning is just doing training stuff, and maybe employee experience is just thinking about how to improve the employee experience, because everything is interconnected. So we have to think about a completely different model for HR, much more consultative, much more problem oriented, much actually flatter, much more agile in the roles, much more like a consulting company, and less like a support function. And from a tech perspective, of course, you need these talent intelligence these insights platforms to give you insights where to focus on, where are these big talent problems, skills gap, and then, how do you how do you move forward with that? We call this this systemic HR. We have a whole big study on that too. How do you move to that? And it’s really necessary in this, in this new intelligence world. So this applies, really, to any kind of company, regardless if you’re an in in an automotive manufacturing or any of the other industries as well. Okay, so I think with that, we have a few questions. So let’s maybe get to the first one that I see here. And I think, Stella, this one is for you. There was a question about, when you were talking about skills, where do the soft skills come in? Because you were talking about all these, these different skills, right? The different TV skills, tech skills, all of HR skills, but where’s the soft skills? Where do you see them?
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Interesting question there, Eddie, I think. And thank you very much. You will see that the soft skills are not part of the, you know, the multipliers that we present, because they are actually underlying. They’re they’re like a sanity part. They exist that they transcend every part of the of any organization, in any industry, and especially in roles where they play more, you know, they have a higher impact compared to other areas. We did see some soft skills, especially on the talent and HR related part of the organization, on automotive, especially seeing how the talent maturity is lower compared to other industries in the market. We saw that it pays dividends, for example, to prioritize and work to strengthen communication internally, or to start to increase collaboration in terms of the of the soft skills. But I would say that right now, especially in the automotive manufacturing industry, the make or break skills, because the change is so fundamental to the business model being completely reimagined, the emphasis and the highlights go into The more technical, the more core business oriented skills. But always, always, there are the soft skills that are part of any discussion of any transformation, especially at large. And there is another question that I’m eagerly also, I think Kelly sent that over because, for example, I’ll share this with an example. Kelly asks, What impact does any of these findings have on production workers front time? So let’s entertain that thought. Here’s the scenario, the hypothesis, if you’re one of these automotive manufacturers who are seeing their productivity, they’re, they’re trying to increase the productivity, and they actually want to also include an EV production line that has different types of, you know, setups, and different types of skills and different types of talent that are going to be supporting those. Can you really sustain the what’s COVID from the operating expense of things. Can you really afford to have manual people, manually handling every part of manufacturing lines double the size of what you have right now?
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Most certainly you will not. I mean, in most cases, pacer organizations did their best.
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To automate as much as they possibly can on the manufacturing processes. Some like Tesla are, you know, as far ahead as using robots only on their manufacturing line, but in the way that we’re seeing it from all the automotive manufacturers. Right now, there is a pressing need to automate as much of the manufacturing process as possible. What does that mean that, if I have hourly production workers working on the manufacturing line, some of their tasks are definitely going away because they’re going to be automated, or because they’re going to be, you know, taking out, if you simplify the process, we’re going to be taking out some steps. Or they’re going to be taken on by robotic arms instead how we’ve seen organizations in automotive manufacturing tackle that is by actually making an impact analysis of automation on their manufacturing staff and say, okay, so even given the scenario that we’re automating, let’s say x percent of our production line, how can we best leverage the talent that we have of those manufacturing roles? Should we upskill them into something else? And interestingly enough, many of the organizations and automotive manufacturers we spoke to actually re-skilled many of their hourly workers into either doing
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EV related quality checks. Remember the quality control component pay setters have 23 point something times more people in quality first you they Up skill, them into quality related roles, or they downsize the teams, especially if they’re hourly, and they, you know, they have fewer shifts, they have fewer hours. So this is one of the first, let’s say, talent areas that we’re seeing to be rapidly impacted by the transformation in the automotive manufacturing. And definitely worth doing the analysis to figure out, okay, what skills do those people currently have, which of them are adjacent, right? How, where, where should we redistribute that talent? Because downsizing necessarily shouldn’t have to be the answer. But where can we redistribute them? Because the skills that they have are adjacent to skills needed elsewhere in the organization? Yeah, that’s where the kind of talent mobility and reskilling and talent marketplace, all of those solutions come in, right? Stella, so it’s, it’s great. Yeah, I love it. I think we have time for one more question. Kathy, what do you think? Yeah, I think we could actually one from Kelly and one from Eddie. Sounds similar like about change. So how do you approach this change? What change framework do you use? And I can give a little bit of that because we actually did another big webinar on exactly that topic. So we did a whole one. And we also have a little like guidebook that maybe we can send to people as well, that April has created based on what we had done together. So basically, we see this different to like change management and really what we call change agility. So really thinking about change, not as like, here’s the big change, and then you’re through it, and then you’re kind of manage status, status quo as is. But really thinking about, how do we constantly change and and support this ongoing transformation? Because it’s not never going to end, right? It’s not going to be like, Wow, we’re through it, and now we’re going to be this transformed company. Now it has to constantly change, because the skills evolves, the technology evolves, the customer requirements evolve. All the things that Stella talked about for automotive happens in all industries as well. Right? Everything changes kind of fast and fast faster. So we see this as a completely different way of thinking about change agility, not just managing change, because we can’t really manage it like that. So with that, I think we’re we’re out of time. And this was fantastic. Thank you so much, Stella, and thank you everybody for the great questions and interaction and and sue over back to you. Thank
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you so much for joining us today, everyone. And thank you Kathi and Stella for a great presentation. If you missed part of today’s webinar or want to share it with a colleague, the on demand recording will be available through the link you used to log in today we will also have this on demand recording available on the Eightfold website, so you can check it out there as well. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you. Applause.
