You can get the staff

Judging by the number of machine vision jobs I see advertised, there’s plenty of work available and not enough people to fill the open positions. In fact, surveys of manufacturing companies keep saying the same thing: a lack of skilled staff is holding them back.

Well I have a bold solution: offer more money.

Seriously. I see no end of companies that are trying to hire an experienced machine vision professional offering salaries of $60 - $80k. That might attract someone who’s done a smart camera project or two, but it’s not going to motivate an experienced professional to switch employers.

Singing from the same hymn sheet is Leland Teschler, Editor of Machine Design. In an editorial the October 10^th issue he takes “pay more’ as his theme and says, “Cappelli puts a lot of the blame for the skills gap myth on employers themselves. ‘When I hear stories about the difficulty in finding applicants, I always ask employers if they have tried raising wages, which in many cases have not gone up in years,’ Cappelli says. ‘The response is virtually always that they believe their wages are high enough. But — and it’s a big but — this doesn’t reflect a skill shortage. It simply means employers are not paying market wage.’”

You can read the full editorial here.

We live a capitalist society where everything has a price determined by the balance of supply and demand. Simple economics tells us that when a resource is in short supply its price rises. Employers though seem not to have got that message, so here’s the bottom line: if you’re reading this because you are desperate to poach or hire a skilled vision engineer, offer more money.