A lot has been said in recent times about the shortage of properly trained and skilled artisans in the instrumentation field in South Africa. At Council level this issue remains on our top priority list, and the education sub-committee headed by Dick Perry, are working flat out in an attempt to find workable solutions for this very serious and pressing problem.
Keeping the above in mind, I would like to relate a conversation I had with an old instrumentation colleague of mine who has been free-lancing around the world for many years; I bumped into Danny by pure accident one morning while doing the rounds at a large petrochemical concern, and after having a chuckle or two about the 'good old days', the conversation turned to the apparent lack of instrumentation artisans, both here in South Africa and in other African countries. This friend of mine is presently contracting for a French concern up in Northern Angola, and he told me how difficult it is for them to find suitable candidates to work on both their on-shore and offshore operations.
According to Danny, most of the sub-contractors presently working in Northern Angola are ex pats from South Africa, and the average age of these artisans is well above 45 years, some into their late 50s even. Now one could argue that the younger guys are not willing to work under these conditions away from home, or one could speculate that any artisan younger than say 30 years of age, does not have the required skills nor the experience to properly function in these situations.
But what about the South African situation: Go to any large factory and look around, how many fresh faced young appys can you see? The foreman, artisans and technicians are mostly in their early 40s and beyond. The core management group and the people who built and developed these factories are in most cases working for large project houses or in-house project departments and the majority of them are approaching retirement anyway. The training departments have shed 80% of their staff and where companies used to take in training groups of around 30 candidates every three months; they now take maybe 5 to 10 every six months. Of the age group 30 to 40, a large group are employed by the instrumentation suppliers as reps.
So what is the bottom line? Our present instrumentation force is getting older, and nobody is training nearly enough new artisans to follow in their footsteps. Very soon there will be nobody left to maintain our factories.
As recently as 10 years ago, most large factories had the capability to specify, procure, install and commission any conceivable piece of instrumentation on the market, and maintain it themselves. Today it is a different story altogether; certain of the larger suppliers are already leasing equipment to the end user with full maintenance. In the not too distant future, we might very well have a situation where the factory owns nothing else but the product they produce, the plant is on full maintenance lease from the company who built it and the control system is on maintenance lease from the supplier.
Industry in general has lost interest in training young artisans, that much is clear. Instrumentation suppliers are used to recruiting their sales and technical staff from the artisan pool created by that very same industry in the past, that is also very clear. So if industry is no longer training, and the suppliers themselves are in future going to be called on to maintain the instrumentation and control systems they sell, who is going to need trained artisans the most?
If a few forward thinking suppliers got together today, and established a training centre with a technical training program using international standards and training codes, they could very easily call it 'The Goose'.
The well trained and industry specific artisans graduating from this program would be the Golden Eggs.
Johan Steyn, President SAIMC, [email protected]
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