The invitation
A sector short of engineers asked how to secure, train and keep them.
NECCUS and Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc brought Scotland's decarbonisation community together for an innovation showcase, and asked me to speak on the people problem: how a highly competitive sector meets the challenge of securing, training and retaining talent inside an engineering market that is short of people everywhere you look.
I told the room something they were not expecting to hear from the talent speaker. Recruitment was no longer my focus. Having qualified with the CIPD in HR and Organisational Design, my work had moved to helping businesses grow through effective people management, and the talk I brought reflected that shift.
The talk they expected, and the one I gave
The generic hiring talk has been trotted out at every sector event for a decade. I did not give it.
Everyone in that room had heard the standard advice before: hire early, grow your own, build your employer brand, partner with universities, offer more money. It is not wrong, it is just worn out, and it asks a room full of innovators to sit, comply and hope the market improves. My argument was the opposite: do not sit and complain, be proactive and engineer your own solution, the same way you engineer everything else.
The expected talk
- Hire early and pay more
- Grow your own pipeline
- Polish the employer brand
- Wait for the market to loosen
Permission to Pivot
- Treat your people strategy as a product strategy
- Apply your own innovation frameworks to talent
- Hire for behaviours, train the technical
- Stop writing job descriptions, start defining missions
The thesis: the Innovation Mismatch
Your business is built to pivot. Your talent framework was built in 1985.
The room was full of organisations using cutting edge frameworks to solve net zero problems: Lean for efficiency, Technology Readiness Levels to manage innovation risk, gap analysis to find opportunity. So I asked one question. Why are so many still running a talent framework from 1985, with rigid job descriptions, siloed departments and career ladders designed for a factory floor?
That is the Innovation Mismatch. A business that pivots weekly, sometimes daily, with people locked into roles written six months ago. I argued that this rigidity, not the labour market, is the single biggest bottleneck to the speed and creativity the mission demands. Then I showed them what it looks like to close the gap using tools they already trust.
Lean Talent
The biggest waste in an innovative company is untapped potential: the brilliant idea an engineer has that sits outside her job description. Fluid teams form around problems, apply their skills, disband and redeploy without bureaucratic friction.
Role Readiness Levels
A TRL 1 technology is an idea; a TRL 9 is a deployed system. Roles should mature the same way. The person hired for early stage R&D may need to pivot towards commercialisation as the solution matures. A rigid job description blocks that natural evolution.
Capability gap analysis
Do not ask whether you have a SolidWorks engineer. Ask whether you have the capability to solve complex, interdependent problems. A checklist of skills becomes a holistic view of your team's innovative power.
Human Capital
HR and hiring sound administrative, a cost centre from the old world of rigid structures. Capital is a strategic term: an asset you invest in, that appreciates, and that generates a return. Financial capital buys the machines. Human capital creates the innovation.
The engine: hire for behaviours, train the technical
Technical skills are the lottery ticket. They do not guarantee you win.
An agile people system does not work with just anyone, so the talk got specific about who to hire. The real differentiators in decarbonisation are behavioural, and three matter most. Systems thinking: the person who asks what a material change does to performance, price, supply chain, approvals and end user behaviour, not just the micro problem in front of them. Radical collaboration: egos at the door, a chemical engineer brainstorming with a product engineer and a certifications expert and valuing every input equally. Resilience in ambiguity: the path to net zero is not mapped, so you need people who treat a pivot as a learning outcome rather than a failure.
The hiring philosophy that finds them is AAF: Attitude, Application, Fit. Attitude is the core operating system: resilient, adaptable, a lifelong learner. Application is the proxy for systems thinking: can they take existing knowledge to unfamiliar problems and go after them like a dog with a bone. Fit is whether they genuinely light up about the mission and collaborate by nature. You cannot teach someone to be resilient or curious. You can absolutely train the specific technical skills you need. Hire the laptop, then add the software.
The method: design thinking, applied to hiring
A five stage loop the audience already uses on products, pointed at their next hire.
Empathise
What actually matters in the first 90 days of this role? Which skills can be taught quickly, and which cannot be taught at all?
Define
Rewrite the job description around those outcomes. A simple 90 day plan replaces the list of requirements.
Ideate
Widen the search: adjacent industries, career returners, strong portfolios over polished CVs.
Prototype
Test for skill, not just experience. Assess ambition, attitude and adaptability. You are hiring what someone is capable of, not what they did in the past.
Test
Measure what matters: time to productivity, quality of work, retention at 90 days. Then adjust the process and go again.
The talk closed with one challenge to every leader in the room. Pick one role you are hiring, erase the list of responsibilities, and replace it with a single line: the mission is to solve this specific problem. Then go and find the person best equipped to take on that mission.
The reception
A challenger talk that started working conversations, not polite applause.
The talk was very well received, and the more telling signal came afterwards: a stream of conversations with leaders in the room about how to deploy the thinking in practice, in their own hiring, in their own organisations. That is the test of a talk built in the audience's own language. Frame the people problem in TRLs, Lean and design thinking, and a room of engineers stops treating talent as someone else's department and starts treating it as an engineering problem they can solve.
I was asked to talk about hiring in a talent short market, and the easy version of that talk has been given a hundred times. The room did not need it. These are people who de-risk world first technology for a living, so I gave them a people strategy in the language they already trust: TRLs, Lean, gap analysis and design thinking. Your biggest competitive advantage is not your patent or your technology. It is your team's collective ability to learn, adapt and pivot faster than anyone else.