Michelin North America will soon celebrate thirty years of U.S. operations. A good number of its engineers have been with the company from the start. Now they're beginning to think about retirement, notes Debbie Harris, director of corporate and university relations for the North America unit of the Michelin Group.
"When a company goes through a retirement bubble like this, it's an opportunity to restructure the demographics of the company," Harris says. "I see hiring increasing at the entry level and the middle level, with significantly more attention to diversity."
Bringing in good technical people is essential, she notes. "They're in the middle of everything. They design the product and the process to make the product, and then they make sure the process itself runs as specified."
Good techies are cherished and promoted at Michelin, Harris adds. The quality assurance manager for a manufacturing facility, for example, will almost always be developed in-house through four or five years of grooming.
The tires Michelin's engineers design and improve are "some of the most technologically complex products you could imagine," Harris claims. Twenty to thirty individual components must be designed, fabricated and assembled to create a product that will function reliably even in extreme conditions.
"We've got a very interesting process," Harris notes. "A lot of it is automated so there's the issue of control. That involves heavy use of programmable logic controllers, and of course there is a whole IS infrastructure around that."
In Michelin's R&D arm, "We have everything from BS engineers all the way up to PhD engineers," Harris says. Some of them are working on concepts "that will come to fruition on a pretty far-distant horizon."
One such concept is the "tweel," an airless tire/wheel combination. "It's not something that we'll be ready to put on cars very soon," Harris says. "But that's the kind of work our research engineers are doing."
Lisa Sherard, director of workforce diversity and inclusion, says that as a global company, Michelin believes that "diversity management should occur within each country's context. We do what's right for the U.S. and Canada and Mexico and other countries, and what's right may be different in different countries."
In recent years the company has required managers and hourly employees in North America to take diversity training, and has significantly expanded its diversity efforts in other ways. In 2002 the Michelin North American diversity network was formed. It includes representatives from each North American facility and meets twice yearly.
In 2003 Michelin formed the Upstate Women's Network, which brings together women in a part of South Carolina where Michelin operates several facilities. And this year the company organized an African American network to provide a forum for the professional development of African American employees.
The 2005 measures have also included some high-powered mentoring. "We've identified high-potential women and people of color, and matched them with top leaders in our company to work together in a mentoring relationship for a year," Sherard reports. "We've learned that we can improve the inclusion of women and minorities by exposing people to one another."
Michelin offers personalized career management counseling for all employees. At the local level, zone level and even global level, individuals and teams are dedicated to career development. For example, "If you're an EE in a plant, a local career manager is going to get together with you and talk about your career aspirations," Harris says.
The discussion may include types of assignments, projects and locations that can best enhance a career. The career manager is also involved in succession planning and is aware of any openings that are coming up. The company offers opportunities for assignments abroad, and U.S. assignments often include global interaction.
There are research centers in the U.S., Japan and France, Harris notes. "When you're hired into a research position in the U.S. you're very likely to be collaborating with someone in one of the other research centers.
"You may be working on a project where you get involved with people from Europe or Asia. It's very interesting."
D/C
Michelin North America
www.michelin-us.com
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Headquarters: |
Greenville, SC (North America and U.S.) |
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Employees: |
23,220 (North America) |
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Revenues: |
$6 billion (North America) |
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Business: |
Tires, Michelin Guide travel publications |
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