Weir ESCO Shapes Future of Work in Response to Emerging Technologies and Shifts in Industry Expectations
14 August 2023
Weir ESCO has long been a supporter of STEM education, making significant, high-impact investments in scholarships, internships and community programs that focus on developing the next generation of STEM professionals—particularly in engineering fields.
While our commitment to STEM hasn’t wavered, the ways in which we support and capitalize on it are evolving in step with how we see the future of work within our organization, including changing workforce and workplace trends, the propagation of powerful new technologies, and shifts in industry and customer expectations.
Below are a few examples of how Weir ESCO is shaping the future of work within its organization.
Sharpening emphasis on skills sets
By sharpening our emphasis on hiring for skills versus historical milestones … we are becoming better prepared to support individuals’ career development goals and build adaptability within our workforce.
Skills have never been more important in the recruiting process. New and emerging technologies like data science and artificial intelligence (AI) are critical to our ability to keep up with the pace of change. And, most importantly, skills in these areas are transferrable between distinct roles. By sharpening our emphasis on hiring for skills versus historical milestones, such as degrees earned and job history, we are becoming better prepared to support individuals’ career development goals and build adaptability within our workforce.
In some cases, we choose to build critical skills in-house rather than hiring from outside. This happens in many different ways, but one example is a unique graduate degree program in applied data science that the company sponsored to elevate data science skills among a wide-ranging group of subject matter experts from around the organization.
Broadening our approach to DEI
Several years ago, when we committed to creating a more inclusive culture where colleagues feel like they belong, we realized that we would need to act purposefully along multiple global fronts.
We set a goal to create a diverse pool of applicants, which we knew would be challenging in the mining industry. We began recruiting from colleges and universities with diverse student bodies, established relationships with the Women in Mining and Society of Women Engineers organizations, analyzed compensation to ensure gender equity and updated our recruitment practices to help eliminate bias. The company also launched affinity groups for Weir women and our LGBTQ+ community to facilitate opportunities to network, educate and advocate for group members and allies.
Capitalizing on productivity partnerships
For most of its 110-year history, Weir ESCO was a plucky, product-centric manufacturer producing high-quality steel parts—at first to support its own product needs and later to provide replacement parts to mining and infrastructure companies. But over the years, our customers’ business and environmental requirements have changed, spurring us to become more adaptable problem-solvers.
This shift is leading us to embrace more productivity partnerships, driving greater engagement with customers to understand their specific needs and create products for them. A key advantage of forming productivity partnerships is that the partnerships provide a robust channel to talk with customers about their individual needs, the issues and problems they are facing, and really become a partner in solving equipment productivity and reliability issues on-site.
One example where productivity partnerships are changing the game for Weir ESCO is in the global mining buckets market where we have a companywide strategic initiative focused on expanding market share.
Bringing expanded digital solutions
Today, mining companies are seeking more digital solutions to help them improve safety, efficiency and sustainability, and better understand the quality and capacity of mineral deposits before they begin digging. Acquired by Weir in 2021, Motion Metrics is fitting the bill nicely by bringing world-class expertise in AI, rugged 3D Machine Vision technology and data science to the entire organization. These technologies are reducing expensive downtime in ESCO’s GET applications and helping improve our differentiated technology offering even further. The additional capability in AI and Machine Vision are also accelerating our expansion into adjacent markets including developing smart eco-system.
