Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - October 2022 - 2

EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
Bill Visnic
Editorial Director
Bill.Visnic@sae.org
Hiring talent to meet high-tech demands
There's always been competition for
engineering talent. But with embedded
software becoming ever more critical
for subsystems in commercial vehicles
and off-highway equipment, nowadays
that competition is a whole lot stiffer.
Aerospace and process-control industries
have been the main competitors for
embedded and controls talent in the past,
according to Dr. Anupam Gangopadhyay,
director of controls and software at
Navistar. Despite " new frontiers " that
are helping to attract and retain engineers,
such as autonomous, connected
and electric-vehicle technologies, " a lot
of the talent that we were hiring in the
past are now interested in things like IoT,
cloud computing, natural-language processing
and social-networking platforms, "
he said during a panel session at
SAE COMVEC 2022 in Indianapolis.
The need for traditional knowledge
and skillsets remains, but new capabilities
now are required, the panelists
agreed. For domain knowledge, for example,
engineers must know about vehicle
subsystems (engine, brakes, etc.)
and sensor technology (e.g., MAF, temperature,
radar), but now also require a
certain level of competence in computer
vision, machine learning and cybersecurity,
Gangopadhyay said.
For agriculture and construction
equipment, the demand for more electronics
engineers hit a little later than for
other mobility sectors, according to
Richard Heisey, senior director of driveline
product development at CNH
Industrial. " We were probably in the
mid-'90s when Tier 1 [nonroad emissions
standards] hit us, " he said. " For us, the
problem is a little bit more acute in that
the change in talent composition is really
shifting dramatically and the acceleration
is continuing as we look forward. "
Heisey stressed the need for organizations
to identify, and periodically re-assess,
strategic core competencies, including
emerging competencies that must
remain in-house to stay competitive,
compared to noncore skillsets and knowledge
that could either be outsourced or
2 October 2022
Ryan Gehm
Editor-in-Chief
Ryan.Gehm@sae.org
codeveloped with external partners. How
does a company determine when to hire
and train instead of renting or buying
know-how? Among other factors is time.
" When do you need that technology? If
you need it now, you've limited your options, "
said Tom Milvert, global director of
electronic tools at Cummins. " If you don't
have time to grow it organically, you can
rent it...or you can go to California and
buy someone who knows how to do it. "
" We now employ more software engineers
than we do mechanical engineers, "
asserted Joel Hergenreter, manager
of tech stack system test and validation
at John Deere Intelligent
Solutions Group. While Hergenreter is
based in Urbandale, Iowa, many of the
technologists the 185-year-old company
is hiring are located far from America's
Midwest. " It's challenging to find those
types of resources [data scientists, AI
and cyber experts, etc.] in the locations
that we traditionally are in, " he said.
For that reason, John Deere has developed
micro-technology hubs around the
U.S. over the past few years. Locations
include San Francisco; Austin, Texas;
Cary, North Carolina and Chicago.
" Technology changes over every three to
five years, " Hergenreter said. " That
means our skills, our processes, our capabilities
need to change over every
three to five years as well. "
Outside the U.S., hotbeds for new
talent include India, Israel, Poland,
Brazil and Mexico, panelists noted. " If I
go back 5-6 years within Cummins, we
really had focused on India, China and
the U.S. when we wanted to augment
or look for engineering services, "
Milvert said. " Now the model is you
have to go where the talent is. Mexico is
a great example; there is a lot of talent
there and they've matured in the technology
areas that we're working on. "
No matter where the talent originates,
an influx of curious and capable engineers
is needed to help companies usher
in their next generation of advanced
technologies. The competition continues.
Ryan Gehm, Editor-in-Chief
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
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Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - October 2022

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