Much has been written about the growing shortage of engineers and skilled automation professionals—
a problem compounded by the near-term retirement of the huge generation of baby boomers.

So when Automation World set out to cover automation staffing topics this month, we decided not to focus so much on the “sky-is-falling” issue of the shortage. Instead, we set out to look at the kinds of skills that will be needed by the next generation of automation professionals, along with some ways that industry and academia might go about producing an automation workforce that will possess the necessary skills.

For this report, we interviewed a variety of well-known industry sources for their thoughts on the topic. Capsule reports from some of those interviews can be found throughout these pages.

Another obvious source for this kind of information is the International Society of Automation (ISA, www.isa.org), which is heavily involved in education and training, as well as the certification of industry professionals. We spoke with various ISA sources for a look at future skills requirements, as well as prospects for an “automation engineering” degree program in U.S. universities. That report begins below.

The ISA view

Vernon Trevathan, a retired Monsanto engineer who is vice president of the ISA Professional Development Department, is an expert in automation skills requirements. With more than 40 years experience working in process control, dynamic process simulation, industrial automation and project management, Trevathan also had responsibility for training hundreds of process control engineers at Monsanto, and is the editor of the ISA book, “A Guide to the Automation Body of Knowledge.”

Trevathan has some definite ideas about the skills that will be required of automation engineers in the future, and the areas in which improvements are needed. He divides these into four categories, the first of which are “foundation skills,” such as teamwork and communication with others, project management, and self-discipline to manage schedules and to multi-task.

“Engineers have a history of being miserable at working with other people, and automation engineers are probably the worst example of that in general, because we like to work with the details, get into the minute aspects of programming and the like,” Trevathan observes.

Engineers have also historically been weak in project management, he adds. “At Monsanto, we almost never let an automation person be the project manager, because we knew they didn’t know how to do it.” Monsanto typically used professional project managers, no matter how small the project. But that’s a luxury today that most companies can’t afford for small automation projects, says Trevathan, meaning that automation engineers must learn effective project management skills.

Trevathan refers to the second category as “enabling skills,” which include detailed process and manufacturing understanding, standards and regulations knowledge, and asset management and predictive maintenance skills.

While most automation professionals 20 years ago worked for end-user companies, the majority today work for engineering services providers. This makes it more difficult for them to gain a thorough understanding of the processes they work with, because they move from job to job, Trevathan notes. Standards and regulations are proliferating today as well, making it difficult for engineers to keep up, he adds.

The area of asset management and predictive maintenance will become increasingly important in the future, Trevathan believes. “We have sort of relegated that to the maintenance department in the past, and automation people haven’t worried about it too much, but we won’t be able to get away with that in the future.”

Everybody struggles

The third area is what Trevathan calls “technical knowledge and skills.” This includes digital communications of all types. “A lot of the new EE (electrical engineering) graduates have a good foundation in digital communications in general, but they probably have studied nothing about industrial protocols,” Trevathan observes. Data management and analysis—including integration with business systems—is another important area, he adds. “But none of this is directly taught in formal undergraduate education, so everybody’s got to struggle to come up to speed on these things.”

Trevathan’s fourth category is “work process knowledge and skills.” One big area here is automation improvement. During Trevathan’s years at Monsanto, the company embarked on a multi-year benchmarking and process improvement project spanning distributed control systems (DCS) at more than 100 plants. The initiative paid off big, says Trevathan, producing billions of dollars in benefits. “The multiplier of benefit-to-cost of doing it was just unbelievable, because we already had most of the hardware in place, and we were just implementing new functionality,” he observes. “But ...