With challenges in recruitment being prevalent and the shift to machine intelligence becoming more critical to the ongoing success of field service operations, what does this mean for the skill sets of the engineers and technicians of the future? Do we need to see a mass de-skilling of the field workforce?

In a recent iteration of the Field Service News ThinkTank sessions, this was an essential part of the discussion. We all agreed there were many significant considerations and important decisions for field service companies to make.

“As we get to the point where the machines become smarter, we need less hardcore tribal knowledge across our techs, perhaps in the field – if we can supplement that knowledge via remote unless it is critical to get the best engineer on-site,” opened up Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News.

“Therefore, I wonder whether that tech role on site becomes more about the brand ambassador about the people skills, about being able to speak to the customer, to defuse the situation if it is a break-fix scenario or present to the customer what optimizations have been made if it is more a predictive maintenance call?” Oldland asked

“I think the trend will continue going that way,” said Jason Andrews, Service Director, Baylo.

“In medical devices, it was imperative that we could speak the clinician’s language in the lab – so we hired that way. In the last company I was with, it was decidedly an inability to talk to the customer, hurting us on repeat sales. We were a commoditized business, so we needed to differentiate through service to keep those customers with us, and that was very, very difficult,” Andrews added.

“Now where I’m at in robotics is we deliver a solution to the customer, but we’re not speaking the same language. We’ve got engineers in front of warehousemen, or they’re talking to managers in charge of manufacturing and warehouse operations – and we don’t speak the same language.

“We’ve recognized that gap, and are going to attempt to fill it to but that’s all based on the relationship to the customer for repeat sales and retention, so I think it stays that way and because that’s a cost of sales, we’re trying to align the service and sales discussions as well,” he explained.

“For me, the biggest challenge is the constraint on finding technicians,” commented Gyner Ozgul.

“As I mentioned earlier, we are hiring a less competent tech, and I also think the idea that we may have to even reach further down at some point, literally looking towards recruiting from high school, is real because we are going to run out very, very quickly, of talent, even if we do everything with AI, IoT, everything with the technology supplement and all of that works, we are still not going to have enough talent – probably within the next five years, which seems like a long time, but it’s not,” Ozgul warned.