Four years on from a tectonic industry shakeup with heavy job slashes, American automakers GM, Ford, and Chrysler need thousands of engineers. Millions of lines of computer code increasingly govern core vehicle functions like braking and air-conditioning. Addressable electronics are heavily integrated into all of today’s vehicles.
So automakers are fishing for engineers with software, electronic and computer network skills—the kind of engineer who has traditionally ignored Detroit. This has forced the auto industry to sweeten salaries and do their best at the difficult job of presenting Michigan as a good place to live and work.
Ford are about halfway to their goal of hiring 3,000 salaried employees this year in their largest hiring blitz in over ten years. Most of these will be engineers and IT specialists based in Michigan. But candidates for those jobs are also getting attractive offers from other industries in other states, such as Apple and Google in California. Executives, engineers and recruiters expect the talent-fishing to get tougher over the next several years.
Ernst & Young predict 104 million vehicles worldwide will have some form of connectivity in the next twelve years. That is more than five times the 20 million such cars expected to be sold this year, the consulting firm said in a recent report, noting that an increasing number of devices and systems controlled manually or mechanically in the past are now computer-driven.
Five years ago, auto engineers were willing to accept starting salaries at USD $50,000, said Matt LePage, lead technical recruiter for GTA Staffing in Dearborn, Michigan. Now, starting annual salaries are up around $70,000.
