Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
This article will examine some of the challenges facing business today, and what businesses need to do to provide the necessary infrastructure and produce suitably skilled personnel, to deliver the broad range of capabilities that will be demanded by the customer over the next few years.
Everyone is aware that in the last few years the service industry has undergone rapid and dramatic change. One significant development has been the growing level of engineer attrition experienced by the service industry, particularly in the last 3 years, with research showing that the levels of attrition have risen, on average, 3-fold. The result has been that the average tenure of role for an engineer with a single service operation has fallen from nearly 20 years, to less than 10 years. This has brought with it a number of challenges for businesses, as inevitably some of their competence will be lost. Initially there was little or no concern over the rising attrition rate, as it afforded the opportunity to bring in fresh blood, to begin to cope with a growing mismatch of skills, and reduce the average cost of engineers as the balance moved towards lower-paid, new engineers.
Once the initial balancing had begun to take effect, problems began to surface, including difficulty in recruiting new talent of the right calibre with the necessary skill sets. Such individuals are in short supply and the service operation of a business is not the first place they think of joining,
This article is accessible for registered visitors only.
You can register here
Registered users can tell Noventum about which subjects they would like to receive email.
Without previous permission data will not be used by others.
