A System Integrator’s Approach to Managing the Automation Talent Crisis
Key Highlights
- Training a new grad costs $20K-$25K per intern and most companies avoid it, creating a self-fulfilling talent shortage.
- Hiring for grit and curiosity over credentials beats chasing the "finished engineer" who barely exists in the needed numbers.
- A self-reinforcing pipeline — built through school partnerships, recorded SOPs, and real capstone projects — turns raw talent into billable engineers faster than traditional hiring ever could.
The problem for manufacturers is that we’re running out of people at the summit of automation careers. Reports say that the average automation engineer is pushing 40+. We’ve built a profession that requires experience, expects specialization and pays well for the skills only to act surprised when no one shows up for these jobs.
Take a look at most automation-related job postings. They all want the same thing:
- A degree.
- A few years of experience.
- Familiarity with real systems.
- Proficiency in software, hardware, electrical and mechanical systems.
The problem is that many undergrads hardly know a career in industrial automation exists. Most people find automation by accident, backing into it from a class project or a random internship.
This means that, if someone doesn’t discover this field early enough to prepare for it, these requirements are objectively unreasonable for those reaching for the first rung of the career ladder.
The $20,000+ reality
Nobody seems to talk openly about it, but the truth is bringing on a new grad costs real money. Between equipment, software licenses, wages and lost opportunity costs for your senior engineers to train, my company spends somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000 per person for a three-month internship.
This is just the bare-minimum basic training required before a candidate becomes productive. Our break-even on a new grad engineer is typically 12 to 18 months, though some can make that jump sooner.
Getting it wrong costs time and money and it’s the reason why many companies avoid a systematic style of training.
In about two weeks, the intern has received training and a healthy dose of context for future projects having touched documentation, coding, testing and project management.
There are a lot of sharp, motivated people out there who can do this work. Finding them is hard. Training them is harder. Once we get them for three months, we’re still running about a 70% attrition rate. That number looks bad (and it is), but after nine years of doing this, it turns out the high attrition rate is an indication that the system is working.
The ones that stay are incredibly high achievers. And the ones that move on typically don’t leave the industry. Instead they move to roles that are automation-adjacent:
- Owner-side roles at plants to oversee the implementation and operation of automation systems to ensure that the automation aligns with business goals and facilitating communication between stakeholders.
- IT/OT and data system engineers.
- Project management.
Two of the best examples in my company started as interns:
- Our top senior engineer, also our first employee, is a legit subject matter expert that our clients request by name for ISA-88 Batch and PlantPAx architecture design.
- Another project engineer, three years in, has dual specialization in electrical design and GMP data integrity, with clients calling to request her help.
Stop hiring for the finished product
The industry keeps trying to hire the finished version of an automation engineer. Job descriptions out there support it: three to five years of experience with full stack knowledge on a vendor-specific automation platform.
That person doesn’t exist in the numbers we pretend they do.
So instead, we hire for: evidence of doing (projects, portfolios), curiosity, ability to figure things out and, most importantly, grit.
The largest cost of training is the lost opportunity cost of the senior engineer giving the training. This can be mitigated by writing out a small set of SOPs that cover the fundamentals of onboarding a new grad.
Many years ago we started to build a pipeline for talent. It started with volunteering and evolved into a self-reinforcing partnership with local high schools, universities and student clubs.
It’s a time commitment for sure, but if you’re good at what you do, your day-to-day basic knowledge is sufficient to teach, run workshops and give students exposure early. Guide students toward transferable skills for any industry so that when they show up to a job they’re not starting from zero.
The largest cost of training is the lost opportunity cost of the senior engineer giving the training. This can be mitigated by writing out a small set of SOPs that cover the fundamentals of onboarding a new grad.
To generate these, we recorded our senior engineer giving an hour-long training on basic topics such as: networking and security, electrical basics, PLC programming (ladder and structured text) and system architecture (SCADA, IO, PLCs, HMIs).
Then we had interns transcribe, expand and recreate any helpful visuals. It’s a self-reinforcing system that can be reused by any engineer for the next session.
The “capstone” project for interns
With our interns, we provide them with a simple project they already understand and have them execute it like a GMP (good manufacturing practices) project where they document everything from URS (user requirement specification) to FRS (fuctional requirements specification) to SDS (system design specification), and handle PLC and SCADA code implementation as well as commissioning and acceptance testing.
There are a lot of sharp, motivated people out there who can do this work. Finding them is hard. Training them is harder.
Along the way, we hammer in the actual process to generate a set of deliverables regardless of the project scope. These activities include building a schedule, estimating durations, and comparing and reporting on estimates vs. reality.
With this approach, in about two weeks, the intern has received training and a healthy dose of context for future projects having touched documentation, coding, testing and project management.
Apprenticeship over time
After this step, we pair them with a project engineer. This reduces training costs by limiting task switching for the trainer.
It also provides the soft skills of how to approach difficult issues, learn new processes and understand when it is appropriate to ask for help under real constraints, timelines and consequences inherent in automating machinery.
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About the Author
Bill Mueller
Founder and Senior Engineer at Lucid Automation and Security
Bill Mueller is the founder and senior engineer of Lucid Automation and Security, an integrator member of the Control System Integrators Association (CSIA). For more information about Lucid Automation and Security, visit its profile on the Industrial Automation Exchange.
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