The French aerospace industry is expecting 2015 to be another very good year, but it is still struggling with finding young production workers. That was the message from officials of Gifas, the industry’s lobbying group, during the association’s annual press conference in Paris in April.
Last year was a record one, as combined revenues amounted to €50.7 billion ($54 billion)–a 2.9 percent increase. The proportion of civil sales has grown to 77 percent and the industry received orders for €73 billion ($78 billion), on a par with the previous record. Gifas president Marwan Lahoud emphasized that aerospace has been the top contributor to France’s net exports.
There were 180,000 people employed in aerospace in France at the end of 2014. “We hired 10,000 people, a net 2,000 of which were new positions,” Lahoud said. The forecast for 2015 is 8,000, but Lahoud warned that these new hires will mainly be replacing retiring workers.
The need for design engineers is on a downward curve. This contrasts with the ever-stronger need for production workers–sheet-metal workers and welders, for example. This is where human resource managers will have the most headaches.
“We need these workers to help us ramp up,” said Lahoud, who emphasized how tricky such recruitment can be. For instance, a major equipment manufacturer, he said, had to hire Tunisian and Polish machinists for its factory in France because “French youngsters have little appetite for these jobs, although numerically controlled machine tools now look like video games,” he went on.
In another striking example, a supplier of forgings was offering 50 jobs in an area where the rate of unemployment is relatively high. The local employment center contacted 3,000 people and received answers from 300 people, only 100 of which actually showed up for interviews. Fifty were selected and were trained for three months. This translated into 47 fixed-term contracts. After one year, 37 were converted into permanent contracts–well below the initial expectation, Lahoud lamented.
This is why Gifas is again betting on its “L’avion des métiers” (literal translation “Find your profession in this aircraft”) demonstrator here at the show. Visitors can see real, skilled professionals demonstrating their jobs in manufacturing, logistics, design and other areas. This year, the focus on production has been strengthened.
Gifas members have been satisfied with a program of alternating training–when a young trainee splits time between the company and a specialized school every other week. The number of young employees in such schemes has increased by 50 percent since 2010. However, small enterprises often cannot afford to join. Therefore, Gifas has created a “shared apprenticeship program,” where a large company pays for the time an apprentice spends with one of its smaller suppliers. The number of participants in the program is expected to double this year, from 100 to 200.
Gifas also would like to have its members creating more partnerships with professional high schools, as Airbus has done in Toulouse and Stelia in Méaulte.
To further help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) improve their performance, Gifas last year launched a program called “Industrial performance.” Spread over three years, it is about enhancing on-time delivery and quality. Some 400 SMEs are being provided with external consultants, essentially paid for by large corporations and the French state. The consultants come from an association called Space (Supply chain Progress towards Aeronautical Community Excellence, in French), which itself gathers a number of France-based aerospace groups. The €22.9 million ($24.5 million) program has so far provided 6,600 days of consultancy.
“Twelve months in, we can already see improvements,” Emmanuel Viellard, head of the Gifas’s equipment manufacturer division, told AIN. The automotive sector is a distant leader and is expected to remain so, notably because it produces less complex parts. However, Viellard found it worth noting the scrap rate in automotive is one or two per million, while it is around 100 per million in aerospace. Viellard is the CEO of Lisi Group, a supplier of fasteners in both sectors. “Poor on-time delivery is the disease of our industry…we are lagging behind other sectors,” Lahoud added.
Lahoud also expressed worry about France’s military spending planning law. For the 2014-2019 period, he believes it is at a strict minimum. As of April 9, Gifas estimated that the promised €2.4 billion ($2.6 billion) was late already. Should the situation drag on, the very existence of 100 or so SMEs is at stake, Lahoud asserted. “If you are a large firm, you know how to shift work from military to civil, but if you are a small company this is only theory,” he said.
Lahoud anticipated this year’s order value to be greater than in 2014. Answering to skepticism that the industry might not meet Airbus’s goal of 50 A320-family narrowbodies per month, he pointed out that increasing the production rate to 30 had been accomplished in an even less favorable environment. “Some were saying we would never be able to do it,” he said.
Speaking specifically about helicopters, Lahoud (who is also chief strategy and marketing officer for the Airbus Group) expressed hope that 2015 will be better for sales. Since late 2014, the rotorcraft industry has seen improved prospects for military helicopter sales and some recovery in civil activity, he said. Lahoud acknowledged that for the past three years the European rotorcraft maker has faced difficult market conditions. He highlighted declining demand for private/corporate helicopters, adding that even as this sector began to recover, the industry was faced with the fall-out from reduced activity from the energy industry, a condition sparked by depressed oil prices.
As a consequence, the book-to-bill ratio for Airbus Helicopters, which is based in France and Germany, has been smaller than 1:1, said Lahoud. The result for suppliers working for Airbus and other manufacturers was a 20-percent cut in output for 2014, compared with 2013, according to Viellard. Earlier this year, Airbus reported that in 2014 it delivered 471 aircraft and received 402 orders–both representing 5 percent drops compared with 2013.