Interview first published in the November/December 2022 issue, then online in February 2023. Phillip Hodson speaks as Kensington Additive’s co-founder and CEO at that time. The outlook for 2023 is a historical forecast, not a description of today’s labour market.
Automation and digital manufacturing are changing the tasks and skills needed in factories, including demand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) expertise. They do not imply a uniform decline in manual work across all industries. Against the backdrop of AM-company layoffs in 2022, this interview examines recruitment from one specialist firm’s perspective.
For this topic, we spoke with Kensington Additive, established in 2014 as a specialist AM division of Kensington Consulting Ltd.
Kensington said its move into AM recruitment followed the placement of a Global Head of AM for an existing client. The company described its role as a bridge between EMEA/APAC businesses expanding into North America and US businesses developing their presence overseas.
With the main areas of focus being Europe and the United States, “we recruit disciplines covering C-Suite, Sales & Marketing, Software, Design for AM, Field Service, Engineering, R&D, Materials including metallurgy, and production operations. An interesting observation is that we find a lot of our clients are now also looking for candidates outside of the AM industry as the market evolves where skills are more mature such as Quality, RA and Supply Chain”, Phillip Hodson, Co-Founder and CEO of Kensington Additive told 3D ADEPT Media.
A 2022 labour market marked by a high number of layoffs
The Layoffs.fyi tracker recorded widespread technology-sector redundancies during 2022. Its totals are not an AM-specific employment census, and the snapshot quoted when this interview was prepared should not be read as a final annual total. Within AM, Desktop Metal announced an approximately 12% global workforce reduction in June 2022 as part of its integration and cost-optimization initiative.
Layoffs can affect employees, recruitment and investor expectations. Their effect on a share price or a company’s prospects cannot be inferred from the announcement alone. Hodson points to political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors—often grouped under PESTEL:
“Even though the market for people continues to grow, obviously company lay-offs in our industry can be caused by many different PESTEL factors. We have seen some companies overestimate demand for their products, some companies ran out of funding and others have struggled with the challenges of growth too soon too quickly. This has affected everyone from OEMs to resellers as we move into 2023, it is clear that economic factors will have some impact on certain companies’ growth plans.
The AM industry is a market driven by a lot of start-up companies promising the next breakthrough technology or material, naturally some will work, and some won’t.”
The interview also raises questions about investor pressure, company maturity and the assumption that job cuts necessarily improve profitability. These are possible explanations to investigate, rather than established causes for every employer.
For a young company, funding, customer orders and the pace of expansion can all matter. For a larger organization, restructuring may reflect a different combination of issues. The scale of a company alone does not establish either its resilience or the maturity of the whole AM industry.
Most importantly, how does this crisis affect candidates who are now looking for a job?
“The learning points from this is to prepare our candidates, so they are asking, searching questions at interview around funding, attrition and the reasons for this, understanding how their hiring plans feed into their long term strategies, and what progression routes does this role have in order to understand the future a little more. Providing consultative focus with candidates is key to our reputation. In terms of start-ups, as a candidate we would advise to consider the track record of investors, the Burn Rate and whether the start-up has customer orders yet or if not, business having customers investing in the company sometimes provides a good sense of the validity of longevity. Timing is also key and whether or not there is good business user cases evident” Hodson notes.
Understanding the current demand for talent in the AM industry
Hodson sees AM education and recruitment from adjacent industries as ways to address skills shortages. This develops a discussion explored in our earlier article on AM job seekers. His observations describe Kensington’s recruitment experience; they do not quantify a global reduction in the skills gap.
“The ability to demonstrate the advantages of making things in a different way coupled with the relative ease of having a print lab means academia has embraced AM and provided courses and facilities to increase education of AM. This has led to an increase in graduates with AM skills for sure and this has gone some way to filling entry level gaps in skills. Despite the increase of seeing more graduates within the AM space and students being exposed to Additive Manufacturing studies, there is still a shortage of skills in the industry. However, we have supported many businesses in seeing the advantage of hiring from complimentary industries to fill this gap. Role specific dependent, sourcing skills from sectors such as specialty metals, CNC, metrology or robotics go some way in solving some companies talent challenges. AM is an ever-evolving market place and as such there will always be a skills gap given the nature of the industry”, Hodson comments.
In this vein, when asked the types of profile that were most sought after, and the types of companies that have recruited the most, Kensington Additive’s CEO explains:
“In 2022 we saw a diverse range of roles within the AM space. Software continues to be an in-demand requirement, as there is a high requirement for software engineers across all industries with specific exposure to the hardware side (not solely data or front-end software) to interact with 3D printers for printer control. Although some 3D printers work on basic scripting languages such as Python, they still require experience with C++ or similar complex languages.
We have seen an increase in the need for Application Engineers as businesses see this being pivotal in increasing adoption and proving more user cases. Furthermore, Field Service Engineers are also in high demand as the number of machines installed increases and customer success becomes key. We saw a diverse range regarding the type of companies that hire the most AM specific disciplines from startups, materials companies, OEMs, Software providers, service bureaus and more. The regions we saw the highest demand from continue to be USA, Germany, France and Netherlands.”
Conversations at Formnext 2022 also highlighted interest in supply-chain, operations and quality-control roles. Looking ahead to 2023, Kensington expected demand from sectors adopting AM, including medical, aerospace, space, housing and industrial manufacturing.
“Some companies will have hiring freezes, however investor-backed companies that have strong application business cases, strong customer demand, good timing and the right people in place will continue to hit key milestones of growth in 2023. Clearly, there are some employers that are going to be holding back on hiring next year for the first one or two quarters – they seem to be larger mature organizations that operate in specific verticals. Despite this, we also know many others that have strong hiring plans and we have no doubt [they] will achieve their growth plans in 2023”, Hodson concludes.
This interview first appeared in the November/December 2022 edition of 3D ADEPT Mag.
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