In previous blogs I have written about how the world of Industrial Automation is taking its lead from trends in the world of IT with examples including virtualisation, thin client architectures, cyber security and version management. One area which we haven’t considered so far is that of the employee profile.
I think it is fair to say that the roots of Industrial Automation are in the engineering community and the traditional employee in an engineering career has generally been male. In my experience the gender diversity in the IT community has been far greater; this is across all the disciplines within IT and in my opinion gives a greater depth of access to resource, talent and more diverse thinking styles.
What stimulated this thought process? I recently attended a global conference which covered Industrial Automation and Manufacturing IT, the audience covered the technical and selling disciplines and looking at the delegates, it was obvious that the gender split was that of an engineering community rather than an IT community. Are we missing a golden opportunity here to help fill the skills gap which is one of the major restrictions to the growth of our market?
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| Written by Phil Gillard, General Manager, SolutionsPT |
Here at SolutionsPT I would like to think that our recruitment policy and career development paths are encouraging a positive gender mix; have we been successful? In the sales and marketing disciplines - I think yes – we have a very healthy gender mix coming thorough the organisation who have some great role models to look up to. In the technical disciplines, less so, albeit to say that where we have been successful in recruiting female technical staff, their quality and professionalism is outstanding.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Please leave us a comment below.
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