Snakes & Ladders – How will you manage your staff against the plans you made for 2013?

The only thing you know for certain about the budget, said an old mentor of mine, is that it’s wrong.

One way or another, you’re going to have issues with the plans you made in November for the year ahead. Not surprising, given that you aimed to somehow foresee the next year’s market conditions, predict the performance of your customers and anticipate everything from super storms to the attrition of key personnel.  Then you reconciled this guess work with your shareholders’ aspirations – which are seldom modest or undemanding – to produce ‘the plan’.

Beyond the obvious problem – the fact that you have no idea if the reality will render the theory absurd – which you can’t waste your time worrying about, you have a major concern that you can and must address:

How will the ever present plan, and perceptions of success and failure, affect your staff’s actual performance?

Whatever you business, and engineering staffing is a perfectly good example, you have some ladders to take advantage of and a number of snakes to avoid in managing productivity.

Ladder 1

New Year Urgency

It’s simple. Your well rested staff return to work fired up, full of resolutions and raring to go. Success follows. Happy days.

Snake 1

New Year Attrition

Not everybody translates their ‘New year – new start’ positivity into hard work for you. January is the biggest month for hiring and job seeking. Right now one of your key staff is planning to make a fresh start of a different kind this year. You are never more vulnerable to turnover among strong performers than you are in January. Have some conversations and make sure you know how your top people are feeling.

Ladder 2

Motivation increases from strong start

So Q1 has gone great. By and large your staff over performed. The atmosphere is buzzing and there’s a great deal of confidence about the year ahead. You can harness this to drive greater productivity. Increase the optimism through the promise of additional rewards. Share some of the results of the over performance, you might see it again in Q2.

Snake 2

Complacency sets in as your staff hit the cruise control button

Some will use success to strive for more success, others will use success as a justification for slowing down. Again your answer is in adjusting rewards. You can’t use the stick for someone who’s overperformed, but you can switch the carrot out for something slightly larger and more juicy. Increase the performance rewards at the highest thresholds and motivate people to excel further.

Ladder 3

Fostering long term development

When you’re on target, you have the opportunity to invest time and energy in developing your staff. If you know they are going to hit targets, you can spare a little time for training, team building and all the other things that are, conversely, the first casualties when you begin to slip behind. When things are going well this year, give serious consideration to investing a little energy in longer term productivity. If you don’t take advantage of successful times to do this, you never will do it.

Snake 3

Entitlement increases from ‘high value / high maintenance’ mentality

Many a trajectory has begun with early success, followed by plateau and then freefall – induced by the early success itself. A proportion of the people who work with you will take pride in their success over the line and become entitled. I’m contributing all this, I should be getting more. I’m better than they are, I should be treated better. These people need me more than I need them. The worst thing about this reaction to success is that it can inflict collateral damage on other staff. Egotism is a virus and it spreads quickly. If you look to reward high performers early with extra benefits to reach for and investment in their skills, they will feel rewarded in both the short term and long term. Entitlement is never just the result of performance, it is the result of performance combined with a lack of perceived appreciation.

Ladder 4

A definition of minimum acceptable performance is understood and you can manage to it

The plan allows you to manage underperformance, because of clearly understood targets that are either met or not met. If they are not met, you have a very clear mandate to chase good performance, or to let people go accordingly. The threat of failure can be a great motivator and if you’ve got an agreed threshold, there is never any ambiguity. Make sure the staff understand the importance of accomplishing targets and then dig in to the work of helping them get there, even if it means reforecasting to meet external challenges.

Snake 4

Doom, gloom and dismal prospects will never inspire improved performance.

If your staff are chasing after a plan so unrealistic as to be entirely unachievable they will not be motivated by it and it might as well not be there. The double threat is that they will hold you responsible for signing off on the budget in the first place. Maybe you were trying to please shareholders; maybe you were just wholly unrealistic. It doesn’t matter – there’s a massive burden to carry everyday and you gave it to them. Sure, they accepted it, but what other choice did they have? If all your staff have to look forward to is one round of meetings after another where they are asked why they are so far behind the forecast, they will not stick around to endure it; they’ll just go somewhere where they can get an even break. And you know that regardless of the plan, they may just be performing better than you honestly expected.

There are many more ladders and many more snakes and I’d be fascinated to hear your own versions. The bottom line is that you’re going to play this game whatever happens; your budget will either contribute to success or to failure. Which way it goes is up to you.



Richard Spragg writes about a number of issues related to engineering jobs. Find out more about Talascend, about electrical engineering, about civil engineering and about mechanical engineering jobs from Our Website.  

How I learned to stop worrying and embrace being wrong.

There are times in life when you have to put your hands up to being in the minority, especially when you’re in the business of putting your opinions out there in the market for all to see. As a lifelong holder of minority opinions, this is not new to me.

So effusive was the disagreement with my first blog in this series, that arrived from all corners of our growing community here, that I feel compelled to present the opposite view. I will wipe the spit and fumes from my face and in all probability convince myself that I was actually wrong in the first place. The source of our disagreement all comes down to this question:

How long should you take making decisions about people?

Last time round, I advocated taking an approach to interviewing that actively sought to avoid a hasty judgment. Bide your time I said. Make sure your first impression doesn’t reinforce itself in an unhelpful way, asking easy questions of the person you like, or tough questions of the person you’re not so sure about, I said. Give them the whole time you’ve allotted to present an overall impression, I said.

Balls. You said.

Almost all the feedback I received, including one rather irate phone call, told me I was talking out of my hat. (And they didn’t say hat either.)

Prevailing wisdom it seems tends massively toward the opposite view, which in the spirit of seasonal democracy, I present to you now. Had this been one of my original blogs on interviewing mistakes I should probably have called it: ‘Trust your primary response, you will make the same decision eventually anyway.’

Some of my many dissenters on the subject refer to rapid cognition, often in reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s hugely successful book ‘Blink’, which explores what happens in our brains in the first two seconds that we encounter a given situation – a job interview being a perfectly good example.

Most of the feedback was less scientific, it just argued the case for calling it early and not wasting time over analyzing something if you know you’re going to do it anyway. The point that stuck in my mind was the Managing Director of a well known oil field services company who told me that while you can change decisions, or walk back mistakes, you can never have back the time it took you to make the decision in the first place. His point was simply that mistakes are so common place in all areas of life, human interaction being based almost exclusively on the actual experience that comes after the fact, that you are as well to make a very quick decision and then be prepared to be equally quick to reverse or adapt it if it turns out to be the wrong one.

To use the example he used, you can navel-gaze over what vacation destination is right for you, you can research it all day long, but you simply aren’t going to know if it’s right for you until you get there. Rather than endlessly debating whether or not you’re making the right decision, you’d be better served ensuring you’re in a position to act quickly if you find you’ve made the wrong decision and correct it. Over time, he argued, you’ll find that you enjoyed 95% of your vacations and not 5%, and that the time you spent second guessing your original thought ‘I feel like skiing, let’s go to Colorado’, was entirely wasted. If Colorado turns out to be too ‘this’ or too ‘that’, it was always going to be anyway. Have an escape plan to the place you’ve always liked in Napa Valley, and don’t ever go back.

A surprising number of people wanted to talk about intuition. This honestly alarms me; sufficed to say that I believe that what people describe as their ability to intrinsically know things with no basis is simply a combination of subconscious sound judgment based on experience, combined with mathematical probabilities and our wonderful human ability to ignore all the facts that don’t suit our narrative. I always trust my intuition. I’ve always been able to know what’s right for me. Really? You’ve been divorced twice, so you might want to put your skills to better use.

Overall, I might even be convinced. There is so much to be said for being decisive, but accepting fallibility. We have a huge amount of experience that we can call upon, whether we realize it or not. Our brains do this for us at speeds we cannot comprehend.

I have heard it suggested that the phenomenon of our lives flashing before our lives as we drown is nothing more than our brains scanning for anything useful it can find from previous experience that might help it escape the danger it is in.

Ultimately, the world is faster than the mind and we will see ourselves pushed and pulled by the decisions we make no matter how smart we are and how convinced we are that we are right. Perhaps it’s time to realize that we may need to jump quickly, and then be ready to jump again.

So in the spirit of quick resolutions, here’s the final Top 5 mistakes made in the interview process from all sides – you can believe me or not, argue or not (I hope you do) and offer, as always – any other ideas:

1.       The first impression trap

2.       Getting the talking / listening balance wrong

3.       Not trusting your first response

4.       Allowing decisions to slide

5.       Accepting uninformed outside advice

Next week, a new topic, new arguments to start and yet more opportunities for you to tell me how wrong I am.



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The 5 most obvious mistakes made in job interviews

Last month we focused on resumes and the importance of building effective written introductions to your experience and skill set.

This month, across our various channels, we’re going to be talking about the importance of interviews, the most regularly made mistakes and the potential that a well structured interview offers for both sides of the table.

During my years in recruiting, HR and marketing in the staffing industry, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. I’ve always considered it to be the most important hour of the hiring process; while resumes can misrepresent things and offers can be accepted or declined – It is the first meeting, between the two people who could end up working together that will get to the heart of the real potential and pave the way for future employment.  

As a starting point for this month’s discussions, I’m offering the first of the five biggest mistakes made by interviewers and candidates, with advice from all three perspectives.

Mistake #1 - The First Impression Trap

The evidence suggests that human beings give far too much credence to the immediate emotional responses triggered in meeting someone. The legendary ‘first impression.’ We make a basic decision about whether we like someone or not almost immediately; while this reaction can be reversed, we often begin to act upon it in a way that makes a reversal less likely. If you want the science, read about the amygdala hijack and the role of the neo cortex. For our purposes it’s best to accept the brain's physical and chemical reactions and focus on what happens next.

For Interviewers:

Here’s the crux – studies suggest that if you like someone you ask them easier questions and their easier answers reinforce your positive perception. If you take an instant dislike to someone, you tend to ask tougher questions and use their relative difficulty in answering them to solidify your negative impression.

Awareness of the problem will help. You should make a conscious effort not to allow your emotional response to guide you, at least in question setting.  A consistent set of questions fixed in advance will help you stay on track. You should also keep a clear thought in your head throughout the process. ‘I owe this person the whole of the time I have allotted to create an impression on me.’ They might come back strong – you must give them the chance to do that if you want to get the most from the process. It’s your time, don’t waste it going through the motions after a rushed decision, when you could be constantly resetting your impression and allowing for something to surprise you and change the game.

For Candidates:

You should assume that the vast majority of interviewers will be oblivious to the dangers of their immediate conclusions. You should put every effort into making a strong first impression.

When I was a young recruiter in London, we used a system called magic wand – a set of instructions for candidates that we believed would statistically increase their chances of getting hired. This is nothing to do with dressing appropriately, or shaking hands with eye contact or anything else any applicant for any job should take for granted. These are slightly less obvious tips.

Don’t settle down in reception.

If you do your immediate first impression will be of someone trying to clamber out of a sofa and reach for your bag. If you’re on your feet, bag in hand, you look prepared and ready for action, you will meet your interviewer face to face.

Have small talk prepared.

A lot of key time can be spent between the elevator and the interview room. The days of secretaries doing all the work are long behind us. If you come to interview with me, it’s going to be me who meets you in reception; this is true of hiring managers and executives all over the US., particularly on engineering jobs, where an all hands on deck mentality prevails.

Compliment something

Positive remarks about the building / area or anything else are a good, simple way to make a first impression. Keep it realistic, if the building is shabby and in a terrible area, you’re unlikely to get away with – ‘Wow, this is such a nice building.’ But if you can, you should. Any kind of positive comment on their working environment will contribute to first impressions. “How’s that little Italian restaurant on the corner? It looks great.”

Say Yes.

Just say yes to things. If you’re offered water, say yes – even if you don’t want it. Saying yes to things creates a positive atmosphere. A glass of water also provides that vital extra three seconds of thinking time before you answer a question. You can’t just sit there staring into space for a moment while you gather your thoughts, but you can take a nice slow sip on a glass of water without anybody noticing the break.

There are more of these, but these are the ones that affect first impressions. The more of these things you do, the more likely you are to get that good start, and if you do, you could find the questions getting easier as your interviewer starts to work with you.

For Recruiters, who are sending candidates for Interviews, you would do well to acquaint yourself with these tools so you can pass them on. Preparing your candidate properly for their interview is a vital part of the agent’s role. A good agent gives both their customers the best chance of success. It’s in everyone’s interests that the interview be productive and that the right candidate doesn’t lose out on an opportunity they were a god match for because of poor interview technique.

When we talk about best fit talent, this is what we mean. The engineering recruiter’s job isn’t to find the world’s greatest professional, it’s to find the best person to fit the job that’s on offer. Part of this endeavour includes getting them through the physical process of hiring and helping them to shine. If you’re just sending your candidates to interviews with a date and time, you’re not doing enough for them or your client. You should focus most of your attention during the recruiting process on the interview.

Interviews are where jobs are won and lost, roles are filled or left unfilled and recruiter targets are hit or missed. Whatever your role in the process, you’re not alone. Everyone wants this interview to end in a successful hire, make sure you’re doing your part to make that happen. Don’t lose a perfectly good hire in the First Impression trap.

Next Week - Part Two  – More Interview Mistakes

Look for live engineering jobs on Talascend.com 

Some questions for comments: What are the most common mistakes you’ve seen? How do you think people can make interviews easier on themselves and others?

Richard Spragg writes about engineering and construction jobs, and business advice in staffing and recruitment

Your career is an accident. Don't make a plan, get a helmet.

We are driving our careers. That’s what we are told. We are sitting behind the wheel, looking at the road ahead, changing gear when we want to, making decisions about how fast we want to go and ultimately which direction we take. Mirror. Signal. Maneuver.

It’s a comforting metaphor. It’s a pity it’s bull.

So often, the mistake we make as professionals is to look back on our career path and see a logical progression. It’s easy to do this when you look back on things in retrospect. It’s easy to believe that this led to that, which led to the other and so on.

But this is all post hoc ergo procter hoc. Seeing a thing as the result of something else, simply because one followed the other.

Let’s call me John Q. I was working as an assistant manager at Circuit City from 2005-2007. I was made the manager in 2007 and held the position for two years before moving to join Best Buy as the regional sales manager. Obviously I’ve done well for myself; my career shows a clear progression. A consistent, linear progression from junior to senior, from low wage to middle management.

Well done me.

I’m leaving some things out of the story though, things that have been edited out of my career history. These were random catalytic events that shaped the whole thing. Because they’re not on my resume, they’re not part of the accepted narrative of my career – but they change everything.

Firstly, I became assistant manager at Circuit City almost against my will. I was young and ideological. I’d only taken the gig so I could get the rent paid while I was trying to get a job in music. I reluctantly accepted the extra responsibility for an extra five bucks an hour. It wasn’t a career decision. Nor was it a career decision a couple of years later, when the manager I worked for suffered a heart attack and retired early, effectively disappearing in a puff of smoke on a Tuesday morning leaving me to take over. I took the job and I did it well, I expected to retain the management job for a few more years. But then, as we all know only too well, Circuit City went to the wall. Suddenly facing the prospect of redundancy, I was forced to put myself out there again, talk to a recruitment company and put my resume online. The result was a great offer from rival Best Buy, to effectively take the level above the one I was working in. I wound up with 20% more money and some stock. It turned out to be a great thing for me. ‘Turned out.’

Now my sensible linear career progression looks like what it really was – a series of random and uncontrollable events that bounced me around with no care for my plans.

Because the truth is that there is no such thing as career management. There is no such thing as ‘planning your career.’ From the time you first walked into the career councilor’s office at school and were told you should be a chef because you admitted to being slightly hungry, through to this morning when you surfed the internet for jobs for ten minutes because one of your colleagues annoyed you. Your vague intent to push your career in the right direction combined with your occasional decision to act when you were unhappy or undervalued, do not constitute a career plan.

Your list of companies you would most like to work for and your sense of what job title you probably ought to have, and in what time frame, are worth nothing to you.

We spend too much time trying to shape our careers and not enough time trying to create the rounded professional identity that will increase our chances of making progress when the inevitable random catalyst presents itself.

Instead of sucking up to your boss, make an effort to be respected by everyone around you. When her kayaking vacation down the Nile ends in tragedy, it will be your peers and reports who are asked what they think of you as a manager, not her.

Instead of surfing for jobs and blasting out your resume, build a strong relationship with a good recruiter. They can be your eyes and ears while you focus on your job.

Instead of chasing the money, chase responsibility. The more you take on, the more qualified you become for more advanced jobs and ultimately more money. Especially if nobody sees the vacancy coming.

You can’t know what will happen, and you can’t control when or where fate will strike. But you can create a solid foundation that will see you right no matter what happens.

Strategy is not about predicting the future, it’s about having a sensible framework around you so that you can respond to anything. Experiences, references, training, qualifications – there’s a reason these things tend to be headings on the resume – it’s because they’re things you actually need. Take these things off the resume, and think of them as real things that you arm yourself with to create a promotable, hirable human being, it won’t be long before you’re adding another level of advancement – whatever it is you want.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

White Paper - Top 10 Tips for Improving your Technical Resume

This week, I'm very pleased to be able to share with you Talascend's new White Paper - '10 Tips for Improving your Technical Resume'.

Some of our most experienced technical recruiters from all over the US, got together to agree the most common mistakes they encounter when they're working with hundreds of resumes every week.

The know what works and what doesn't, and I think this is advice that anyone looking for jobs in engineering in any form needs to hear.

http://www.talascend.com/about-us/white-papers



Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

The 5 worst pieces of advice given by resume ‘experts’.

Every week I’m reading more and more dubious advice from various sources about what you should and shouldn’t put in a resume. Most of it is well meaning, and there’s a point to be taken at the heart of it, but it’s still fundamentally bad advice. I’ve pulled out the five most common examples and explained exactly why I beg to differ.

1. Don’t exceed one page

Keep your resume concise and to the point. Never mind the length. If you need three well laid out pages to properly account for your achievements, take three pages. All each page has to do is make a prospective employer want to read the next page. Hiring companies, recruiters and HR people are usually very busy and often have a lot of resumes to read, but this doesn’t mean they will throw out a four page resume. They are perfectly capable of scanning it and putting it in the ‘interesting’ pile if they see what they’re looking for. The phrase ‘Two pages? I can’t read two pages’ has never been uttered by anybody responsible for recruiting. The phrase ‘Is that it?’ is used frequently.

2. Don’t include hobbies

This is terrible advice. Once again the baby goes out with the bathwater. Hobbies say something about you personally, they are excellent conversation starters and they give your interviewer an opportunity to immediately put you at ease and to make a basic connection. During that ten seconds of elevator silence (the death knoll for a good interview), how easy is it for the person you’re meeting to say ‘So I see you’re a horse rider?’ Give them that opportunity. Hobbies are also a way to say something without boasting. Imagine reading the phrase ‘Ran two marathons last year for the local children’s’ hospital.’ This is saying a lot about the person who wrote it (well they’re not going to be lazy and uncaring are they?) No, hobbies do not belong at the top of your front page. No, you should not go into detail. No, you should not put anything on there that isn’t making a clear, positive statement. Focus on the productive and impressive things you do in your spare time. If you don’t have anything like this to put on your resume – maybe you have bigger problems than finding a job.

3. Don’t include References

Really? Once again they are encouraging you to miss an opportunity here. Including the name and number of the person you worked for in your last three jobs makes a very clear statement: I am confident in the fact that the people I’ve worked for will give me a positive reference. You’re asking the reader to be the next person on this list, don’t you think it would be encouraging for them to see that their predecessors were happy with you? If you have to skip a bad boss, or name their more helpful colleague – that’s fine. You’re offering something up before it’s asked for. It’s a bold statement about transparency. At the end of the day, restrictive HR policies at work inside most companies mean that nobody is going to call the contacts you supply for references, and nobody is going to provide one if they do. Dates of work will be passed from one HR department to another. The days of ‘So, what was she like?’ are long gone.

4. Everybody lies on a resume; it’s fine.

No it isn’t.

If you get caught in a small lie, the assumption will be that nothing on your resume can be trusted, and it will become scrap paper. The only thing a dishonest resume will get you is a job you’re not qualified for. You weren’t the top sales person. You don’t speak French. Your golf handicap is 27, not 7. It doesn’t matter? Tell that to the CEO when he needs you to play golf with him and a prospective French client. Getting a job is not the end, it’s the beginning. Your sins can find you out at any time. You should always put a positive spin on things, go ahead and polish up your Kia Sorento so it looks good – but don’t call it a Ferrari. At the end of the day, a resume is designed to get you job interviews, but it doesn’t disappear once the job is yours.  

5. Don’t do anything too original. Keep it simple.

People hate originality right? Boring is good. When you’re reading 100 resumes a day, heavens forbid anyone should put something in the inbox that stands out.

It’s 2012. There are fantastic tools out there; there is no shame in showing that you understand how to use a couple of them. No, you don’t want your resume looking like the menu from a suburban TexMex restaurant, but as with so many of these pieces of advice, there is a great deal of distance between the advice you’re being given and the mistake it’s trying to steer you away from. In this case, there’s a lot of room between an over designed, unprofessional mess and a dull black and white resume. Strike a balance; show some kind of creativity. Research has shown that recruiters spend more time on resumes that are more than flat text.

So if you’re looking for work, pull out your resume and run it through a few quick checks. This is your chance to stand out, so don’t blow it based on antiquated advice that’s been rumbling around since the dark ages. You are a fully rounded, three dimensional human being. If one page of flat text 12pt Times New Roman, with no personal elements and no creativity can communicate the real you, it might be more than career advice you need, and you’ll have to go somewhere else for that, I’m just a recruiter.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

At Ground Zero, not size but significance

One World Trade Center has reached 100 floors. 

It is the world’s most famous construction project. (It was before construction began.) And while disputes continue over costs and contracts, One World Trade Center is ignoring the bureaucrats and climbing implacably upward.

I last visited this subject in January to explain the ongoing dispute between the New York and New Jersey Port Authority and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum Foundation over millions of dollars in claims over infrastructure costs and delays. (9/11Museum construction takes a $440m backward step.)

Today at the site of the Ground Zero rebuilding, the pendulum swings back to good news, if only temporarily. 

A major milestone has been achieved in the tower’s construction: It has reached 100 floors. The overall significance of this project, and the importance of the tower to the local and national community need no introduction from me, sufficed to say that it’s nearly here.

Because so much conversation around the project hangs on politics and national symbolism, very few people seem to really understand the simple architectural identity of the building.

So what is One World Trade Centre when it’s not being a symbol? The answer, to critics, is a fairly mediocre skyscraper by all normal measures. There are a great many people who find it impossible to ignore the limited ambition that the tower’s design represents.

At 104 floors and 1,776 feet tall, it will be the first major New York Skyscraper not to be the tallest building in the world (Both Chrysler and Empire State held the records when they were built, as did the original twin towers.) One World Trade Center will be 3^rd and within three years of its opening it will drop to 8^th. (Interestingly, it will be the tallest building in the western hemisphere, with all seven of its taller cousins making their homes in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, China and India.)  

There are those who claim that if One World Trade Center is a symbol of a nation’s resilience, it is also a symbol of diminishing ambition. Who could have imagined a time in the 1970s when America’s flagship skyscraper development had no plan on being the world’s tallest? They point to its decreased commercial square footage (2,600,000 square feet, the twin towers delivered 7,600,000 square feet), they will point to the reduced floor count (104, down from 110.) There are those who believe that the tower is simply not ambitious enough to be worthy of its predecessors, built the same year that the Space Shuttle program launched and just a few short years after the first American walked on the moon. In 2012 the shuttle program is closed; there may never be another moon landing and the new smaller tower is just further evidence of America’s slide back into the herd in terms of engineering ambition.

To believe this is to entirely miss the point of the Freedom Tower. It was never supposed to be a feat of engineering. It was supposed to be, and is, a reasoned and respectful balancing act that will provide a national memorial and a thriving business hub.

In achieving this it has surely surpassed the significance of any of the world’s taller buildings and it has paid a higher price than any other for its very existence. When people look at this building, they will see so much more than its height, they will see a piece of America’s history.

We don’t judge the Lincoln Memorial by its size. I have no idea how tall the Washington monument is. One World Trade Center is not a skyscraper, it is a national monument. There will always be a taller building somewhere, but it is hard to imagine one that will be more significant to a nation, or more clearly understood.  




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Case of disappearing engineers remains unsolved

Skill shortages are threatening America’s Engineering & Construction industries. We all acknowledge that the problem exists. You will find more people in this country who deny the existence of climate change than deny that America is desperately short of engineers. There is simply nobody on the other side of the argument.

Today the New York Times highlights a new and worrying aspect of the problem in a front page story (Where the jobs are, training may not be by Catherine Rampell.)

The future of the engineering workforce is seriously unclear.

Cuts in education spending resulting from economic woes are kicking us where we can least suffer the blow. The latest problem? Expensive technical classes are being cut before anything else at cash-strapped public colleges all over the country. Teaching technical subjects is expensive. Science, technology, healthcare and engineering require equipment and materials that you simply don’t need to teach Literature or Philosophy.  This is not a rant about arts and humanities programs and what they contribute to American industry – we need philosophers, we need journalists and yes Governor Perry – we need anthropologists.  We just don’t need them nearly as badly as we need engineers.

It’s probably valuable to explain why the engineering skill pool is in such a poor state of repair. There’s a number of reasons, but these are the top 5:

1.       Pull of the IT sector during the 80’s and 90’s.

The IT sector (electronics, programming and so on) sucked a huge number of technical minds away from civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. Those people are in their 40s now, and they represent the age group and level of experience that is scarcest in the industry today.

2.       Baby Boomers are bowing out

The huge generation born in the late 40s are retiring now. These are our senior people, the experienced engineers who might have hung around until their late sixties in order to fund their retirement. But these people prospered in the last three decades; they got rich on tax free assignments in the Middle East and high dollar contracts that lasted ten years instead of ten months and many have looked to retire early, cashing out at 60 on final salary pension schemes, their mortgages long since paid off.

3.        Women

Since the 1970s, every industry has seen massive rises in the percentage of female entrants. Not engineering and construction. 11% of engineers are women; you can dress the statistics up as much as you like – this is contemptible. (40% of lawyers becoming partners this year will be women; 33% of doctors are female; Chartered Accountants? – 41%). In the race for the hearts and minds of women choosing a profession, we are failing miserably.  

4.     Outsourcing undermining intake            

There’s a joke circulating our community at the moment. What’s the first thing you teach an undergraduate in Engineering 101? How to say Do you want fries with that? in Chinese. As young people watch technical jobs being outsourced, it’s difficult to sell them on the career choice. Whether their perception is accurate or not (it’s not) the fact is that the perception that engineering is not an outsource-proof choice of career is hurting us.

5.    Today’s issue – we’ve stopped teaching.

Today’s issue merits a place in the top 5. If we shut off the pipeline now by failing to make classes available to those who want to train, will that make things better or worse in the future? Enough said.

Nobody in the United States of America is working on a solution to the long term problem of technical skill shortages. Not the private sector, not education, not government – nobody. We need ideas – real ones – that can be applied now and sustained. Without this effort, from everyone in the industry, we’re going to continue our current slide.

Next week:

Part 2 - Solutions to the engineering skill crisis - what's on the table?








Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Time, the old enemy, is why recruitment agencies are still so valuable.

Recruiting, like fishing, is time consuming - whoever you are

There’s an awful Eckhart Tolle-esque quote sweeping Facebook and Twitter lately. It says ‘It’s not about time, it’s about choices. How are you spending your choices?’ Spreading this cringe-inducing banality appears to be some kind of competitive sport on social media.  It makes me long for the days of gas lamps and messenger pigeons.

But, there is a point underneath: What you choose to spend your time on is important. 

Time management is a misnomer. You can't manage time. It doesn’t matter how well organized you are, you can't put a 25^th hour in the day, or slow the clock down. What we refer to as time management is simply making good choices about what to do and when to do it.

With each now development in the sphere of staffing over the last 15 years, people have been claiming that the recruitment industry is under threat. The internet was going to kill off Recruitment agencies; then the job boards and now social media. But Recruitment agencies are not going anywhere, and the reason is this: there are better ways for employers to choose to spend their time. Each new product or online service that arrives in the employment sphere does not change this fact.

The major job boards, through every possible marketing investment up to and including Superbowl advertising, have greatly increased their resume resources (and credit to them - they have built great businesses and made a lot of coin.). But in doing so, all they’ve done is to make the lake employers are fishing in larger – they have not made the fish any easier to catch. The universal uptake of social media and the pushes made by Linked-In particularly to raise revenue through recruitment services (136% increase in the last 12 months) is only serving to make the lake even bigger yet.

What matters is still the fishing.

Nobody has the time to sit and fish for hours on end except professional fishermen. Let them do it. They will catch fish to order, and you don’t have to pay a dime until the fish is in your hand. That has to be a better plan than spending what time you can running down to the lake and casting your line in the water.

The Recruitment industry represents a basic example of a sensible division of labor.  Finding, attracting and cementing new hires are tasks that require full time focus. It doesn’t matter how many tools are made available to employers, potential hires still need to be found, courted, convinced and onboarded through a process that is sometimes sensitive, often intricate and always, always time-consuming.

There can surely be no greater individual piece of evidence in support of this theory than the fact that recruiting companies outsource their own recruitment. There is a thriving market for ‘Rec-to-rec’ recruitment (agencies who only place other recruiters). It might sound ridiculous, but it's common sense. The job is better outsourced to people who have slightly more experience of the specific needs of the process and all the time in the world to do it. The flashiest fishing rod will not improve your ability to catch fish - you need skill and time. Many employers have the skill, but few have the time. At the end of the day, you can't eat a fishing rod and you can't hire a resume. 

So I'd advise anyone who's hiring this year to remember: Even Recruiters know that recruitment is a job that would be better outsourced. The reason the recruitment industry has thrived despite all the developments in the global job market is because there are simply more valuable ways to ‘spend your choices' as an employer.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

5 ways to make the Recruiters you work with more effective

Whether it’s an agency you’re dealing with or your own in-house Recruiters, you’ll get what you need faster if you can deliver these five simple things:

1. Decent Feedback

When it comes to refining a search and delivering you a better candidate, knowing why you’re passing on the ones you’ve already been given is invaluable. A trial and error approach is no good for anyone. In a world where job descriptions are often mass produced from a template and access to the real decision maker can be limited, some simple, direct feedback is vital. Ultimately it’s going to save you time and get you what you need faster.

2. Some Exclusivity

If you’re working with thirty agencies on your vacancies, you’re not going to get the best service from any of them. If they know their work is unlikely to bear fruit simply based on the fact that they have a one in thirty chance of getting their resumes properly reviewed, they’re not going to send their best people. The cream of candidates, those who are not available from job boards and agencies en masse will always go to the customers who take the recruiter most seriously, retain a few close relationships with reputable agencies and don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the more resumes they get, the more people they will hire.

3. Access

The more a Recruiter can understand about your projects and your culture, the faster they can get you the people you need. Don’t be afraid to invite your two or three best recruiters to see what you’re working on, to get a feel for your business and your team. This will help them to understand your real needs and provide you a better service. I always council clients to be suspicious of vendors who want to take them out for expensive dinners, or drop off fancy gifts. They’re only paying for it in the short term. In the long term, they’re going to want something in return that they haven’t earned. It’s the recruiters who want to meet you and your team in your office who are probably the ones worth taking seriously. They’re prepared to let the work do the talking.   Let them come; most of them are house trained and the benefits will come back to you.

4. A Little Respect

Recruiters have it tough. Whether they’re corporate or commercial, you can bet they’ve got more jobs to fill than they reasonably can, more competition than they’ve ever had before and a great deal of pressure coming from the people they’re accountable to. Like agents in any field, there is a long held misperception that they are reckless cowboys who will do anything for a fast buck. For the vast majority, who are working long hours for modest base salaries, this is hugely inaccurate. During my time working with a lot of different Recruiters and recruiting teams, the biggest frustration expressed by strong, professional recruiters has been that their motives are constantly doubted, even by the customers with whom they had developed good relationships. When something bad happens: when someone pulls out at the last minute, or drastically increases their salary demands, remember that it is highly unlikely to be your recruiter who’s yanking your chain. They just lost their lunch.

5. Realism

Recruiters work the vast majority of their hours for free. The no win, no fee payment structure removes client accountability for the time recruiters put in. The trouble with this is that when a company thinks they might need twenty five people, they often get their recruiters attention by forgetting to mention the ‘might’.  I’ve seen so many urgent jobs that turned out to actually be bids. The thing is, I would have been delighted to help on the bid – heck we could have helped make the bid better if we’d known that’s what we were doing. Give your recruiters your best assessment of the real opportunity. If there are ten openings but you think you’ll fill five of them internally, let them know.

All in all, Recruiters live at the behest of their customers, and that’s how it should be. A decent Recruiter should be working on delivering a better service with each opportunity they get. They should want to earn your business every day. If you think you’ve found an agency who is genuinely doing those things, then meet them half way. It’s good for you, it’s good for them and ultimately, you’ll get a better, faster service.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

9/11 Museum construction takes a $440m backward step

by Richard Spragg

Regular readers of the blog will remember my post last September on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks praising everyone involved in the design and delivery of the remarkable memorial at Ground Zero.

Three months is a long time in construction and the entente cordial is back in the rubble. The New York and New Jersey Port Authority is embroiled in a financial dispute with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation over millions of dollars and Mayor Bloomberg is stating categorically that the museum will not open on time later this year.  

Artists's rendering of the Museum (New York Post)

The Port Authority claims it is owed $300m in infrastructure costs, the Foundation claims it is actually owed $140m due to delays in the project. They are $440m dollars apart. Work has stopped. 

There’s very little comment coming from anywhere on the situation. Only the Mayor has made comments about it during unrelated press conferences and journalists from the Wall Street Journal and other major outlets have been largely unable to secure comments on the record since the story broke.

1 million people have visited the 9/11 memorial since September, putting it on a par with the Statue of Liberty and Empire State building as a pull for visitors. As with Ground Zero itself, some will be gawkers and some mourners but the majority are sure to be genuinely interested visitors unsure of what they will take from the experience.

The sooner those visitors have access to the museum exhibits, to add facts and back story to the open reflection of the monument, the more valuable an experience they will have.

Whatever the bureaucrats need to do to make this happen, they need to do it now.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Engineering Crisis in OG&C - A Classic Story of Supply and Demand

by Mike Moriarty


Look at the career opportunities pages of most major oil and gas jobs operators worldwide and you’ll see hundreds of positions for engineers at every career level. And that’s just the majors. EPCs, equipment suppliers, vessel builders and others are competing to garner the attention of the energy industry’s new and top engineering talent.

Project, chemical, and process engineers, geophysicists, seismologists and more are in high demand the world over. Add to that, the support industry positions like equipment designers, IT experts, fluid injection and biochemical engineers and you get the picture. Untraditional fields, sands, shale and new technology all mean engineering. There’s one small problem…the number of qualified engineers doesn’t necessarily meet the demand.

The Causes
A relatively flat historical price per barrel of oil adjusted for inflation from the 1980s to early 2000s saw a lull in the OG&C marketplace in terms of employment opportunities for young engineers.  Some major oil and gas programs at colleges and universities even shut down due to low demand.

Enter 2008.  “Peak” oil, environmental regulations, unrest in the Middle East and Africa, the Iranian nuclear threat, speculation and more all led to a record jump in oil prices. OG&C careers became desirable again – in short order and with a shortage of available talent to fill the positions.

“In countries like Nigeria, where oil is the main industry, everyone wants “in” so finding a number of interested candidates is not a problem. In the Western world, we are competing with lucrative IT careers for young talent. In the UK, it’s the financial sector. When the price per barrel rises, our number of applications for enrollment goes up, when the price goes down, enrollment drops off on a proportionately measurable level. There is a lag in supply and demand of engineering candidates.  When the price fluctuates in either direction the lag tends to be one year in Europe and two years in the United States.  We’ve mapped the data and the correlation is very strong,” states the Chairman of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Talent Council and Professor at London’s Imperial College, Dr. Alain Gringarten.

Tar sands, shale gas and deep water well production become economically feasible as prices rise. Despite recent fluctuations, these new sources remain profitable because new technologies such as horizontal shale wells and fracking technology improvements, tar sands conversion processes and more have lowered the cost of non-traditional extraction. With these new technologies comes the demand for increasingly specialized education and experience.

“Although definite advancements have been made, we are still learning about extracting oil from these sources. Projects such as these demand a higher education and an experience level beyond an undergraduate petroleum engineering degree. If fact, we did away with our undergraduate degree [at Imperial College] because the new technologies involved with increasingly complicated extraction methods, such as  deep wells and exploration, require a sophisticated level of thinking and specialized knowledge of core subjects such as geophysics, electrical, structural and mechanical engineering.” adds Dr. Gringarten, “Candidates for our master’s and doctorate programmes must have a proven background in these core disciplines because the material covered requires it. Degrees are tailored to mastering highly specific areas of petroleum engineering which are based on their prior education and experience.”

The Competition is Fierce for Oil & Gas jobs
Even though some industry experts estimate that it takes a young engineer about 8-10 years of experience to evolve into a senior leader, a concept further supported by Dr. Gringarten’s comments , younger engineers in the energy industry are still sitting in the catbird seat. The attrition of the Baby Boomer professionals, the lure of IT disciplines for potential candidates, and other factors, still makes them, and existing senior level talent, the new “black gold” of the industry.

Since 2008, higher education is the U.S. has been scrambling to resurrect programs, and, graduates of energy concentrated engineering programs have nearly a 100-percent chance of getting hired upon graduation, sometimes even before they graduate.

“In this market,” states Damiene Humphrey, Account Executive for Troy, MI based technical staffing firm, Talascend.  “you have to wear a lot of hats and be ready to roll because the opportunity to fit the right candidate with the right company can pass you by if you’re not paying attention or making the right offer. In addition to managing accounts and developing relationships with new customers, even I find myself sourcing, pre-qualifying, recruiting and selling our customers to engineering professionals. It’s all worth it when you make that connection between fit and need.”


Help in the Fight
Project and hiring managers across the energy industry certainly have their work cut out for them. The engineering shortage is worldwide and has created a greater demand for corporate recruiters and human resources professionals as well. Some companies are turning to industry organizations and technical resourcing companies for help in enticing candidates through their doors.

“It’s a full time job for hiring managers and then some,” adds Humphrey. “I’ve been in the oil industry for quite some time and I’ve never seen anything like the spike in demand for specialized engineering talent that we’ve experienced over the past few years. The qualified candidate pool is small and global in nature. Many of my clients are shocked at the increase in baseline benefits and incentives required simply to get an experienced candidate’s consideration these days. Because of this phenomenon, hiring managers should look for a resourcing partner that digs deeper, beyond the resume and skills, to find out exactly the type of person they want to add to their organization. The wrong hire can be very costly.”

“The SPE Talent Council is engaged in helping to ensure degree programs meet today’s high level of standards in terms of education. What was taught in schools 20 years ago is not very applicable in today’s hi-tech industry,” says Dr. Gringarten. “In countries where new discoveries are being made like Ghana, Angola and Kazakhstan, while the desire is there, the educational resources are not. The SPE Talent Council and its members are also helping develop educational programs in these areas and connecting developing markets with experts in the industry to improve the quality and quantity of their engineering talent to help balance supply and demand,” says Dr. Gringarten.

The Future
The future of OG&C engineering jobs, much like the barrel price, is uncertain. There is certainty that the need for qualified engineers specializing in industry related disciplines will continue to increase as new technologies emerge. In addition to US colleges and universities, hiring managers and project managers may need to take a more global approach to finding their next all-star recruit. Malaysia, the Middle East and surrounding areas are current hotspots for finding young talent. Industry organizations and resourcing firms with a global reach can help in the effort to garner the attention of top industry talent as well.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs and oil and gas jobs.

BP's concerns come as no surprise

By Andrew Rowlands

I was unsurprised to read that BP is struggling to find home-grown engineers to redevelop two oilfields in the North Sea (Sunday Telegraph, August 15). Sadly, the problem is not restricted to BP or the oil and gas industry. It is set to get worse because the output from British engineering-related degrees is static at best and the current workforce is aging rapidly.

I was also not surprised to learn that BP's Trevor Garlick linked the shortage to a 'brain drain'. We will need more new engineers than we think to simply tread water because engineering is the ultimate 'have skills will travel' profession. Research among the 300,000 engineers on our global database shows that three quarters of 21 to 30 year old British engineers want to work overseas, where their skills are increasingly in demand.

On the current trajectory, with a declining pool of recruits and overseas competition for talent affecting the supply side, we will surely be in crisis if the Government's plans to rebalance the economy towards industry comes to fruition. That is why the intervention by Sir John Parker, the new President at the Royal Academy of Engineering who called recently for a 50% increase in university qualified engineers per year, is to be welcomed.

If the Government fails in its goals and Sir John succeeds we should not let the thought of legions of unemployed engineers put us off from pursuing his ambitious targets. There will be plenty to keep our engineers occupied overseas even if their departure signifies a successful export industry we would rather not have.

Australian Engineers Week – Who cares? (apart from us engineers.)

 by Richard Spragg


Anyone who owns a television knows that this week is one of the most important weeks in the annual calendar. From August 1^st – August 7^th the world comes together to honor the most advanced and powerful beings on earth. That’s right folks, it’s Shark Week. 

Every nature channel, newspaper and magazine is dominated by savage looking pictures of these four hundred million year old beasts leaping ten feet out of the water and ripping their prey to shreds. Everyone loves a good shark – not up close and personal maybe, but few things make a better photograph or news story than a Great White. 

It’s also Australian Engineers Week. This is not quite so high profile, but perhaps that’s understandable, after all engineers can’t smell a single drop of blood in the ocean from a mile away. (Although I met a project director or two who would have a bloody good try.)

The comparison got a few of us here to thinking about the real source of a lot of our problems in the global engineering community. In a world where we see skill shortages almost everywhere, where technical projects of all shapes and sizes are threatened by a lack of available resources, we have to ask ourselves – what are we doing to attract more people into our industry? How can we make a career in engineering appealing to the next generation of potential engineers? 

This week, Engineers Australia (www.engineersaustralia.org) published its statistical overview for 2011 and one of the major conclusions of the study is that the number of new graduates entering the field has grown much slower than demand. We simply aren’t bringing as many people into engineering at a ground floor level as we need to. 

The results of low entry to the industry are obvious. Above all it means an increased dependence on overseas workers (52% of the engineering labor market was born overseas, compared to an average of 36% in other industries.) Engineering is a global community – there will always be an important flow of skills across national borders, and Australia is no different from any other country in importing necessary skills as they’re needed. But ultimately, Australia must grow and develop a home grown resource pool for everyone’s benefit and evidence shows that its ability to do that has flat lined. 

The solution has to come from inside the industry. What are we doing, as engineers, as employers, as contractors and as agencies to encourage increased participation from the next generation of engineers?

If the answer is ‘nothing’, then we cannot complain when our projects run out of staff, the majority of our workforce comes from outside Australia and our ability to deliver projects suffers now and in the future.

You don’t have to be a shark to see the trouble coming a long way off.


Talascend Australia is currently working with major employers in Australia's engineering market to find original answers to skill shortage issues. To contact us, visit www.talascend.com/australia