The global shortage of field technicians and engineers is expected to peak over the next few years as the Baby Boomer generation escalates retirement.
Over the next three to four years, the global industry could lose up to 40% of its estimated 20 million personnel across all sectors, including tech, according to the US-based Service Council, which also found that half of all field service operations are experiencing staffing shortages.
As experienced older workers leave, it has become progressively difficult to hire a skilled, young labour force to replace them, meaning that the current pool of proficient field workers is relatively small, with employers ending up poaching from each other in an ongoing skills merry-go-round.
A big problem in attracting young talent appears to be the industry’s image – even though the sector is transforming rapidly, field service tends to be viewed as a traditional, manual, male-dominated, blue-collar career based on anti-social hours.
David Cramer, president of service delivery at global data centre and network optimisation provider Park Place Technologies (PPT), says: “One of the challenges with this is that blue-collar work has become less attractive generally. It’s a challenge getting hold of plumbers and electricians, and field engineering has experienced a similar negative perception as most people now want white-collar jobs.”
Dan De Backer, senior vice-president and product manager at Extreme Networks, believes that another problem lies in the younger workforce inevitably pursuing careers in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud.
“Being a field technician is just not as appealing of a job,” he says. “If people have the option of either working at Google or being a field technician, they’ll opt for Google nine times out of 10 as it’s more enticing [than] being a field technician.”
But the sector’s labour shortage has also not been helped by its ongoing lack of diversity, with women, for example, making up only 9% of the total workforce. Cramer says he is seeing a “skilled labour shortage” more than a straightforward labour shortage.
“There are shortages in the more advanced skills and those relating to older technologies at both ends of the technology lifecycle, but the middle of the bell curve is OK,” he says.
Expertise is lacking in areas, such as AI, GPUs, virtualisation and new ways of building compute infrastructure. It is also scarce in terms of supporting older systems such as AS/400s and mainframes. “Few people of my age want to do this kind of work and they’ve not been replaced, so there’s big competition for skills,” adds Cramer.
Labour shortages are also particularly acute in global terms in South America and Asia Pacific, where exposure to new technologies has generally been more limited than in more developed areas, such as the UK and US.
A changing skills profile
Patrycja Sobera, senior vice-president and general manager of Digital Workplace Solutions at IT services and consulting firm Unisys, says that while she is currently not seeing demand for field technician work grow overall, she is seeing a shift in demand for skills as many customers upgrade their data centres to support AI.
“If you’re talking about standard PC support, they’re breaking less because Dell’s AI PCs, for instance, have in-built telemetry for preventative maintenance,” says Sobera. “What is increasing though is infrastructure-related work, such as storage and cooling, which is more complex.”
Over the past year, she has seen a 20% fall in activity in the consumer PC space, while the volume of infrastructure support work has risen by between 20% and 25%. Moreover, Sobera expects infrastructure jobs to rise by a further 30-35% next year as AI adoption continues to gain momentum.
Elsewhere, it seems the current labour crisis is being made worse by widespread disengagement among existing employees. Another Service Council report reveals that only 54% of field technicians expect to continue their field service career. The remaining 46% said they were unsure about it or planned to change roles, with a mere 37% of this cohort putting their decision to leave down to retirement. Field services leaders cited workforce engagement and retention as their top internal challenges, alongside a lack of resources.
How to retain existing talent
So, what can tech employers do to address this troubling situation? A key focus for Unisys has been finding ways to retain existing talent, which it has done this by listening to employee feedback and attempting to address their frustrations.
One approach here has been to invest $20m in optimising various platforms to boost the efficiency of processes and make field technician’s working lives easier. This investment included integrating the company’s field service system with its logistics system to enhance work order allocation and optimise dispatch, scheduling and driving routes.
“Up until a couple of years ago, we’d focused more on the issue of Baby Boomers reaching retirement age rather than defining any potential problems with the industry,” Sobera says. “We weren’t necessarily prioritising frontline workers, so the focus was on digital experience and shiny improvements rather than thinking of how we enable people to become better equipped and be able to go home on time to have a meal with their families.”
To support less experienced workers, a mobile digital training platform has also been made available. This provides them with AI-based simulations so they can learn on-the-go, based on whatever work they are undertaking at the time.
The introduction of such technology “is helping make us more attractive to those entering the industry”, Sobera believes, although she acknowledges “we still have a ton to do there”. The organisation has also conducted targeted media campaigns to this end, emphasising “our new tech and worker enablement”.
As for enabling knowledge transfer from more senior to junior employees, Unisys is capturing the former’s expertise using an AI-based digital twin system rather than traditional knowledge management approaches. The aim here is two-fold: to both retain Baby Boomer knowledge and to help attract new talent. The idea is that the system should enable faster onboarding, thereby reducing “frustration, and the learning and experience curve”, Sobera says.
“It uses an AI-driven model as a kind of virtual replica of what Baby Boomers do, so it captures processes and real-time data from tickets to training,” she adds. “This means the system simulates, monitors and provides decision-making steps to those with less experience.”
The value of in-house training
PPT, on the other hand, is taking a more mixed approach. As many modern data centres do not permit workers on site during working hours, field technicians are often forced to work at nights or over weekends. Therefore, the firm has introduced shift-based working to ensure employees have down time during the week.
Furthermore, to recognise “they are our most important asset”, Cramer says, they have also been allocated pay rises, are provided with regular training and have the option to rotate jobs.
“We mix work up and allow our datacentre field engineers to periodically select other kinds of roles for a while,” he says. “So, they might take a professional services job that’s unrelated to the datacentre, which means they can gain a new focus and new skill sets.”
The company has also introduced new career paths beyond traditional field technician management roles. For example, experienced personnel can now join a field engineering force of advanced engineers who solve complex customer problems remotely. Technical account management is another potential route up as is joining an internal product testing team or dealing with logistics, warehouse and stock management.
“What we try to do is create an environment where field technicians can migrate anywhere in the service delivery organisation,” Cramer says. “We know how hard it is to find people with unique technical skill sets, so we really don’t want to lose talent.”
As well as hiring graduates though, PPT also puts a strong focus on recruiting from its own internal teams and developing both their technical and soft skills in-house. On the technical side, a particular focus is on older technology areas, such as mainframes, which are no longer covered by university curricula.
“We’ve had mixed success, but we do find many young people want to spend time as field technicians before moving up on the technical side. So, our focus is to invest in young people – and we do find most of them stick with us to help grow their careers,” Cramer concludes.
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