“The demographic trend has to be reversed. Those of us who work in the digital world know the lack of software engineers there is, but there is also a much greater need and in the coming years there will be a great lack of technical manpower.”
These are the words of the president of Stadler Spain, Íñigo Parra, who participated yesterday in the fifth edition of the Paco Pons Conference organized by the Valencia Entrepreneurs Association (AVE) together with the Association for Management Progress.
Stadler currently has 339 active vacancies, according to the website: Parra highlights that “in Europe there is a lack of engineers, and what scares me is that as a country and continent we are not generating enough society.” Likewise, Íñigo Parra, recent Forinvest Award winner, had previously spoken at the welcome ceremony, together with the vice president of AVE, Agnès Noguera. Later, individually, he offered a conference that delved into the challenges of “an uncertain future.”
In that ‘coming soon’, the executive expressed the concerns of the business community regarding inflation, the rise in the price of raw materials – “those of us who want to buy microprocessors have to go to auctions”, he detailed – or the Next Generation European funds, among others.
“As the CEO that we are, we have to delve deeper into the financial area and manage with sustained inflation in mind, but we are executives and we make decisions. Let us think that we will not have a future if we do not earn money today,” Parra recalled. And it is that apart from the economic situation, the bulk of the participants are concerned about human resources. It was one of the most repeated themes, in the speeches of the different speakers: it is difficult to find and, above all, retain talent.
It was unanimous in the interventions of the three directors who reflected on the future of the Valencian Community: both Mayte Bacete, site director of Maxlinear Hispania, and Majo Castillo, CEO of Zeus, as well as Marta Gutiérrez, CEO of Atlántica Agrícola, explained – among other topics- how they incorporate technological talent.
“It’s really crazy. Now people come and go very quickly, all this pushed by the pandemic. We have to assume that the cycles of an employee are going to be two or three years, this is the new world,” he explained. Majo Castillo, whose company has gone from having a workforce of 60 people in ten years to hiring 65 people in just a month and a half.
Castillo speaks of “talent chaos” and acknowledges that in the face of a lack of personnel, companies like his try to apply software programs that “help me train the employee soon and quickly, because it is essential.”
For her part, Mayte Bacete, from Maxlinear Hispania, explained that hers is a “geostrategic sector” – they design chips and communication systems – that also perceives this great growth in the need for new talent. There are currently 1,600 employees and they hope to be close to 3,000 shortly, because, she warns, “we are in full growth.”
The day has also included other interventions such as that of Ángeles Delgado, president of Fujitsu Spain; and a round table about the family business in which companies such as Pinturas Blatem, Cecotec and Andreu World have insisted on the idea of a lack of talent.
For example, explained Nuria Luna, CEO of Blatem, that “we try to convince them with our values, making them fall in love with our project”.
In general, managers and specialists in human resources explained that the needs for manpower are both in technological sectors and in traditional industry. “People are missing everywhere you look,” various sources added during the coffee break in which the 250 attendees exchanged ideas after two years of the pandemic, at an event held at The Westin hotel in València.
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