# Automation and Digitalization: Closing the Workforce Skills Gap

> The automation industry faces a demographic reality: the engineers who built today's control systems are retiring, and the talent pool entering the field is…

- Canonical URL: https://wiki.aspotomasyon.com/article/automation-workforce-skills
- Publisher: ASP OTOMASYON A.Ş. (ASP OTOMASYON Wiki)
- Category: Digital Transformation
- Published: 2026-08-11 · Updated: 2026-09-13
- Reading time: 4 min · Language: English

The automation industry faces a demographic reality: the engineers who built today's control systems are retiring, and the talent pool entering the field is smaller and differently trained. Meanwhile the systems themselves are becoming more complex — cybersecurity, data integration, and software practices now sit alongside relay logic and loop tuning. The **skills gap** is not a future problem; it shows up today as commissioning delays, vendors doing work plants used to do in-house, and operators who cannot use the diagnostics their systems provide.

![An industrial data workflow. Each handoff needs an owner and a documented data contract; collecting more signals alone does not establish business value.](https://wiki.aspotomasyon.com/assets/diagrams/digital-transformation-context.svg)

*An industrial data workflow. Each handoff needs an owner and a documented data contract; collecting more signals alone does not establish business value.*

## The Shape of the Gap

Four distinct gaps are usually conflated:

| Gap | Manifestation | Why it is hard |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Retirement drain | Departures of senior engineers take decades of plant-specific knowledge. | That knowledge lives in heads, not documents. |
| New-technology gap | Existing staff untrained in IIoT, OPC UA, cybersecurity, and cloud integration. | These are new disciplines, not new versions of old ones. |
| Pipeline gap | Too few graduates entering industrial automation and instrumentation careers. | Perception, salaries, geography, and education mismatch. |
| Legacy-skills gap | Young engineers cannot maintain the older installed base (DCS platforms from the 1990s, ladder systems, pneumatic instrumentation). | New talent is trained on current technology, not installed technology. |

Most plants face all four simultaneously, which is why "hire more engineers" is not a strategy.

## What the Plant Can Do

1. **Knowledge capture before retirement** — systematic exit interviews, documented control narratives, standardized as-built documentation, and "shadowing programs" where juniors work alongside seniors for months with a capture plan. The goal is documentation that survives the person: the plant's real automation knowledge is currently undocumented by default.
2. **Deliberate apprenticeship** — a structured 12–24 month program: rotation through maintenance, commissioning, and engineering; a mentor; defined competency milestones (read a loop diagram, tune a loop, configure a VFD, commission an OPC UA connection); and certification by demonstration, not years of service.
3. **Internal training tracks** — a small curriculum per discipline (instrumentation, PLC, DCS, networks, cybersecurity) with vendor courses as modules. Budget training as capital: the skills are the plant's production capacity.
4. **Cross-training operations and maintenance** — operators who understand the automation basics (alarm handling, trends, safe restarts) and technicians who understand the process reduce both failure rates and engineering workload.
5. **Partner with education** — internships, capstone projects, and faculty visits create a pipeline and let students work on real systems (including simulators) before graduation.
6. **Standardize to reduce skill dependence** — documented standards (programming conventions, naming, templates) mean any trained engineer can work on any part of the plant. The plant's resilience should not depend on two individuals.

## Retaining and Attracting Talent

The gap closes on the demand side too. The engineers plants need choose employers deliberately:

- **Modern tooling** — engineers notice when the plant runs current software versions, real version control, and modern hardware; nothing signals "your career will grow here" like the engineering environment itself.
- **Visible career paths** — a published path from technician to specialist to lead engineer, with the training investments attached to each step.
- **Real problem ownership** — the work that attracts and keeps engineers is responsibility for systems, not tickets; delegate ownership with accountability.
- **Remote-capable engineering** — secure remote access and good documentation allow hybrid work and draw talent from a wider geography — for the younger generation, often decisive.

## The Role of Standards and Vendors

Standards reduce the skill burden: IEC 61131-3 languages, OPC UA integration, and ISA-101 HMI design are portable skills that transfer between plants and vendors. When selecting vendors, weight their training ecosystem and documentation quality as heavily as the hardware — a platform with weak training locks the plant into the vendor's services forever. And insist on as-built documentation deliverables in every project: the vendor's knowledge must become the plant's knowledge at handover.

## Measuring Progress

Track the gap like any other risk: average age of the automation team and retirement horizon, count of plant systems with current documentation and named second-competent owners, training hours per engineer per year, time-to-competency for new hires, and the number of engineering tasks outsourced because internal skills were missing. Review annually; the gap closes in years, not quarters, and the plan must be patient and persistent.

## Summary

The automation skills gap has four faces — retirement, new technology, pipeline, and legacy — and the plant response is knowledge capture, structured apprenticeship, internal training, standardization, and deliberate retention. Treat skills as infrastructure: document what only people know, train by demonstration, standardize to de-risk, and build the employer brand with modern tooling and real ownership. The plants that invest in the workforce now will commission, run, and extend their systems themselves — the rest will depend on whoever is available.

## Apply this to your project

- Name the operational decision, its owner, and the evidence required to judge whether it improved.
- Document asset identifiers, units, timestamps, quality rules, and definitions shared between OT and business applications.
- Compare the pilot against a recorded baseline before extending it to other machines or sites.

[Follow an ASP project guide](https://wiki.aspotomasyon.com/guides) to connect the fundamentals with implementation and acceptance.

![Engineering review sequence: Question → Baseline → Pilot → Scale. Keep the recorded evidence with the accepted configuration.](https://wiki.aspotomasyon.com/assets/diagrams/digital-transformation-review.svg)

*Engineering review sequence: Question → Baseline → Pilot → Scale. Keep the recorded evidence with the accepted configuration.*

## Primary references and further reading

Use the original specifications and product documentation for implementation details. The examples in this guide are illustrative engineering scenarios, not published project results.

- [ISA — ISA-95 enterprise/control system integration](https://www.isa.org/standards-and-publications/isa-standards/isa-95-standard)
- [OPC Foundation — Information modelling](https://opcfoundation.org/about/opc-technologies/opc-ua/)

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Cite the canonical article: https://wiki.aspotomasyon.com/article/automation-workforce-skills (Automation and Digitalization: Closing the Workforce Skills Gap, ASP OTOMASYON, updated 2026-09-13).