A major hurdle for field service organisations

While we often focus heavily on the changing trends in technology and the subsequent impact of these trends in field service, it isn’t technology adoption or integration that is the biggest challenge that field service organisations face or will face in the coming 10 years. In fact, the fight for field service talent will be the biggest area of concern for organisations stemming from the fact that:

• The current service workforce is ageing and retiring.
• There isn’t adequate supply of new workers looking to take on the profession of field service.

In a recent talent management survey conducted by The Service Council (TSC), nearly a third of respondents indicated that the loss of knowledge from a retiring workforce was currently a major challenge for their business. Another 39% indicated that it would become a challenge in the next 5-10 years. That’s 7 out of 10 organisations indicating that the loss of talent and knowledge in field service will be a major challenge in the coming years.

Therefore, a large percentage of organisations are looking at strategies and tools to retain and store the tribal knowledge that is about to head out of their organisations and to develop a systematic way of transferring this knowledge to the remaining or incoming workforce. Some of the most popular strategies being deployed:

• Development of a formalised succession plan for the field service workforce.
• The formalisation of mentoring and coaching programs.
• Investment in knowledge management tools to capture resolution practices.
• Provision of tools to field workers to record and retain resolution practices.
• Establishment of formal working teams comprising retiring workers with new hires.

While the strategies highlighted above address knowledge loss from a retiring workforce, they don’t support the discovery of new talent. In fact, field leaders need to find new field service technicians right away in order to meet rising work demands. This is being reported by a number of organisations in the TSC community. Our recent Mid-Year Service Review highlighted that the inability to meet service demand with current resources was a major challenge seen by field service organisations over the previous 6 months.

In response, organisations are looking to:

• Align with technical colleges and institutions to provide experiential learning opportunities to future field service workers. However, the number of technical colleges and institutions is dwindling.
• Modify hiring criteria and begin to look for workers who might not have the necessary technical skills, but have customer management and communication attributes and the aptitude to learn and absorb technical information. Our field service talent survey found that customer management attributes were rated as extremely important in the hiring of new field service technicians.
• Revamp training regimes to support technical knowledge and emphasise on-the-job training with experienced field service technicians.
• Rely on new talent sources comprising untapped or under-tapped talent pools such as youth, older workers, military veterans and more.

Technology can play a role in supporting knowledge capture and transfer. More so, technology can enable greater efficiency in fieldwork. However, there will always be the need for talented field service technicians to make customer visits, diagnose conditions and resolve customer issues. In 10 years, we might have all the tools at our disposal, just not the people to carry these tools into the field.

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