Recruitment
@imveurope
www.imveurope.com
The fight for engineers
Greg Blackman asks machine vision firms what strategies they employ when hiring staff A
common problem among many machine vision companies is recruiting qualified engineers.
Machine vision is a specialist branch of
engineering that encompasses multiple disciplines – optics, soſtware, electronics, automation are all desirable qualities. Te very nature of industrial vision, therefore, can make it difficult to find technical staff. Couple this with the general shortage of
engineers, blue-chip firms snapping up the most promising graduates, and a need for commercial skills alongside technical ones are all challenges the relatively niche machine vision sector is faced with. Julia Börries, HR consultant at Basler,
commented: ‘An increasing shortage on the labour market is definitely noticeable, especially [for] in-demand, but rarely available, technical experts or specialists from IT, engineering or soſtware development.’ Basler has 808 full-time equivalent members
of staff as of 30 June (it had 570 employees at the same time last year, although some of this growth is by acquisition). Te company runs vocational training programmes
and internships at its site in Ahrensburg, in Germany, as well as integrated degree programmes, with academic theory being taught at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, as well as hands-on training conducted at Balser. Börries added that, generally speaking,
senior roles are harder to fill than junior roles, as they are more complex roles that require a skillset from different disciplines, such as a combination of technical and commercial skills. At the time of writing,
Bitflow, based in Boston, USA, is in the process of hiring an application engineer and a hardware test engineer. Donal Waide, director of sales at Bitflow, said that a common issue facing the company is that ‘the best and the brightest graduates’ tend to be hired by the Boston offices of companies such as Google, Microsoſt, Facebook and Amazon – ‘there’s a reason most of these companies are a stone’s throw from MIT,’ he said.
16 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • Yearbook 2019/2020 Benjamin Lehmann, human resources
business partner at camera maker Allied Vision, also noted that higher salaries, which can only be paid by blue-chip companies, is one challenge Allied Vision faces when hiring staff. In terms of direct competition from other
The real needle in a
haystack is engineers with good interpersonal and commercial awareness
machine vision firms, Waide listed Cognex and MathWorks as two competitors. ‘As a smaller company it’s a unique environment [at Bitflow] and a lot more personal interaction than some of the larger companies,’ he said. ‘Tis does affect the
type of candidate you wish to hire, or who wants to work there. ‘Machine vision is a tiny part of computer
engineering,’ Waide continued, ‘and while it’s a growing industry – vision is in more and more applications daily – a lot of companies tend not to hire a machine vision engineer, but instead convert an internal
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