Maintenance technicians are badly needed

While waiting for my turn, my thoughts wandered to the back of the bakery, where the baker, with the help of complex machines, is toiling to get the loaves, croissants, gingerbread, etc. ready on time. So, in addition to being a bread baker and an entrepreneur, he must also be a true maintenance and asset manager. And at the same time, baker is also a bottleneck profession these days. So it is not at all obvious that I can enjoy a nice fresh loaf of bread every day, something that many people tend to lose sight of. 

When it was my turn, and the friendly baker's wife handed me the sliced and packaged roll, I was shocked! Instead of the baker's artistic drawing, I saw a large, helmeted young man. Above that, a cry of distress sounded: 'A job badly needed and close to home? We are looking for a maintenance mechanic. It turned out to be a vacancy at Aswebo. An original approach indeed, because it is something else than an advertisement in a job newspaper.

But actually, I want to talk more about the fundamental problem that lies behind this bread bag advertisement. It has apparently come a long way. That a company has to resort to the local bread bag to get any response at all to a vacancy. And that in the midst of an economic crisis, with thousands of unemployed, even close to home. At the end of October there were 228,411 CVs of job-seekers in the Candidate Information Selection System (KIS) of the VDAB. 1,549 of them are interested in a job as a maintenance mechanic. Experience shows, however, that maintenance mechanics with a stable career who register their CV as a new job-seeker in this system are inundated with offers after just a few minutes, and after a while have to switch off their mobile phone to get some peace and quiet.

When I hear stories like this, I can only conclude that something is fundamentally wrong. It cannot be that there are so many unemployed on the one hand, and a great need for well-trained technicians on the other. Now that the cries of distress are already appearing on a bread bag, it is high time that the government, education, employers' and employees' organisations take decisive steps to guide pupils and students towards a technical profession. After all, the need for well-trained technicians will increase in the future. After all, the current economic crisis will not last forever, and with an increasing demand for production, the demand for maintenance workers will also increase further. At the same time, many technicians from the baby boom generation will soon be leaving the labour market.

If we do not act today and cannot fill the technical jobs, the consequences will be incalculable. After all, maintenance functions play a key role in our economic activities, in which industry is still the most important value creator. Besides maintaining existing productivity, maintenance is decisive for the fast and large-scale introduction of smarter, cleaner, more sustainable or energy-efficient technologies. These 'upgrades' of existing systems are important, because current production assets are ageing, while economic conditions demand a longer life at competitive levels. 

It is clear: maintenance technicians are the key to our country's prosperity. Not investing in them would be a really stupid decision.

Wim Vancauweberghe

PS: the vacancy for a maintenance mechanic at Aswebo has currently been filled via interim, by a technician of Spanish origin who has been living in Belgium for two years. No response was received via the bread bag, although it was distributed in more than 30,000 copies. The weeks before, there was no response to the vacancy, published on the company website and in the vacancy database of the VDAB. Currently Aswebo is again looking for an extra maintenance mechanic...