Japan’s car makers grapple with big salaries for IT staff
HEADHUNTER Casey Abel spent four months trying to hire a data- centre architect for a Japanese auto maker, including five meetings with the client – one with the top executive. In the end, the IT specialist joined an e- commerce company abroad for significantly more money.
“There’s just a massive mismatch in salaries,” said Abel, managing director at recruiter HCCR K.K., who has spent as long as a year trying to land some IT candidates. “You’ve got some engineers making 20 million yen ( RM765,000) a year.
Then you try to fit them in the traditional manufacturer-based salary structure where it should be seven to nine million yen.”
Attracting the best information technologists is becoming increasingly important for Toyota, Honda and Nissan as they seek a bigger share of revenue from IT- driven services such as ride- sharing and cloudbased monitoring of vehicles. Nissan Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn has said Japanese car makers can’t afford to lose the “global war for talent” to new rivals like Uber Technologies and Tesla Motors.
Luring such talent requires big pay bumps in Japan because the companies are chasing the same experts that banks, tech companies and everyone else needs, said Abel. The auto makers “operate within extremely strict budgets and the business is generally low margin.” Japanese companies suffer from a dearth of domestic talent and the perception their business is more “mature and slow moving” than the new wave of tech startups.
Honda said it will adopt a more flexible salary policy at its new Tokyo lab, while Nissan declined to comment specifically on pay at its new Tokyo data office. Toyota located its so- called connected- car business unit and AI research centre in the US, which a spokesman said offer competitive compensation.
Japan has had the most severe talent shortages in the world since 2010, with IT professionals among the top three hardest positions to fill, according to Manpower Group’s annual market survey.
The country is short of an estimated 171,000 IT staff in 2016 and the number may more than quadruple to 789,000 by 2030, according to a survey by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry ( METI).
That race for staff is
There’s just a massive mismatch in salaries. You’ve got some engineers making 20 million yen (RM765,000) a year. Casey Abel, managing director at recruiter HCCR K.K.
accelerating. Nissan said in October it plans to hire about 150 engineers in Tokyo by 2018 for software, cloud computing, data analytics and machine learning. Honda starts operation next year of a Tokyo research centre mainly for artificial intelligence and IT.
Volkswagen AG said this week it will hire more than 1,000 IT experts, tapping high-technology sectors, gaming industry and top-level research centres, in the next three years.
Toyota last month announced its connected- car strategy, which includes building a big data center to create new business using drivers’ data such as tailoring insurance policies to drivers’ habits, and hired former US defence scientist Gill Pratt to set up and lead an AI research institute in the US.
“You need really good talents to do those really complicated things,” said Jeremy Carlson, an analyst of autonomous driving at IHS Markit. “Japan has an educated and intelligent population, but many highly motivated and capable individuals in these fields flock to areas like Silicon Valley.”
Japan came last in METI’s survey in terms of the proportion of respondents who thought IT was an interesting area to work, while Indonesia, India and the US ranked highest.