Talent Strategy
Livestream insights: Smart factories are outrunning the people who run them
ZF and Continental managers argue the skills gap closes through promotion, peer training and honest maturity checks rather than new gadgets.
Automotive manufacturing has an odd imbalance. In the AMS ABB Automotive Manufacturing Outlook Survey, 30% of decision makers rank labour and skills shortages among their biggest challenges. Some 31% are investing in automation, yet only 19% are expanding training. Machines are arriving faster than the people meant to run them.
An AMS livestream on workforce transformation put the problem to two practitioners who had spoken on the Humans in the Loop panel at AMNA in Detroit. Lazola Tutani is a production department manager at Continental. Raidan Lage is regional smart factory coordinator at ZF Group, responsible for smart factory initiatives across more than 10 plants in the Americas. Their answers had less to do with technology than with leadership, patience and sequencing.
A shortage of appetite as well as skill
In South Carolina, Tutani says, local labour tends to have minimal manufacturing experience, so onboarding is slow. Persuading skilled people to move to a small town is harder still. Lage sees the mirror image at entry level. Finding people who can do the work is manageable, but finding people who want to is not, because fewer young people are drawn to the shop floor.
Lage has noticed that lines making lighter, electronics-heavy components hold on to staff longer than those handling heavy, oily or dirty parts. A pleasant environment is only a first step, though. “We don’t just want bodies there. We want people actually engaged in the operation,” he says.
At some ZF plants, production workers can step off the line for a few weeks to build apps that help with their daily tasks. They feel proud, they tell their families, they want to learn more and they move into better-paid skilled roles. Lage was unsure whether ZF’s recruiters advertise such stories externally, and conceded that they probably should. Tutani points to recognition schemes, idea management and his own path from trainee to senior manager.
Looking beyond the university pipeline
Tutani notes that BMW’s university partnerships in Spartanburg and Continental’s links with Clemson supply industrial engineers. The harder gap is semi-skilled talent. His suggestion is the high school. Many young people in the South cannot afford university and drift towards the military or sports sponsorships. Germany’s dual study programmes, in which employers fund studies while students work, offer a template worth borrowing.
Judgement before software
Lage argues that knowledge is now cheap. “We are in the age of questions,” he says, since AI will answer almost anything, even from a photograph. What matters is curiosity, fluency with AI tools and a grasp of what the plant actually makes. A leak test is now performed by machines, so the useful knowledge is why the part is tested that way. That understanding produces better questions and better processes.
Tutani adds a safety argument to the conversation. A tyre is a safety-critical product, so Continental simplifies processes to limit what newcomers can get wrong, uses AI and smart tools in training, and teaches first principles by hand before introducing AI detection. A worker who has made the product manually can tell when the machine is wrong.
For leaders he stresses emotional intelligence and self-awareness, since everyone has access to the same AI tools.
Human trainers remain central to the conversation. Continental pairs new hires with experienced colleagues in a buddy scheme, and Tutani says peers often show better methods than a technical trainer. Lage calls a person in the room “the gold standard”, because people remember how training made them feel. Tutani’s rider is that carmakers and suppliers must invest in the soft skills of their trainers too.
Augmented reality helps for newcomers from retail who have never seen a plant, because standardised machine designs make digital twins and simulated walk-throughs feasible.
Capturing what veterans know
Lage’s most practical advice is to connect AI to the maintenance database, machine documentation and IT ticket system. Picture a new maintenance technician on third shift with nobody to call. He photographs an HMI error and the model replies that a colleague fixed the same fault last week by lifting a plastic cover and pressing a green button.
This only works if documentation is current and skilled workers write down how they solved problems. Lage stresses that these are real use cases today. Tutani says Continental does much the same and also uses the data to spot trends.
Change that starts on the floor
On rollouts, Lage says everything begins bottom up, with issues escalating from the shop floor into strategy. Once a strategy is set, it turns top down, because people want direction. Tutani is blunter.
Dictating from above without knowing frontline pain points leads nowhere. Both treat a new product introduction as a window to review processes, and Tutani wants a formal review afterwards because suppliers and standards differ by region.
And the same rationale applies across cultures. A practice that works in Hanover cannot simply be lifted into the US. Tutani recommends Gemba walks and round tables first, then keeping the headquarters framework while changing its flavour. Lage runs an Industry 4.0 maturity assessment at each plant before proposing anything. Arriving with virtual reality headsets at a site that lacks the culture for them risks a forklift collision. Vendors approach him constantly. “I say no maybe 99% of the time, not because of the technology, but because of where we are.”
Promote first, hire second
Tutani calls the first 30 days of a hire “the make-or-break time”, and wants leaders to be visible and inspiring enough to attract people in the first place. Lage goes further. “If you are hiring for skilled positions, it’s already a signal that maybe you don’t have in place the right path for someone to follow to grow in your company.” His target is to hire externally only at entry level and to promote into everything else.
Any plant manager facing a vacancy in a skilled role could start with that test. If the answer is to look outside, the ladder may be missing.
