Battery Revolution Clubhouse Recording - Battery Talent and Salary Report 2022

0:00Transcript

0:00A big welcome to everyone. Thank you so much for joining for our 59th session of the Battery Insiders podcast, hosted in the Battery Revolution Clubhouse. And today we're excited to have a very important topic to talk about, and we have touched on this awesome previous sessions. Today we want to dedicate an entire session to today's topic, which is battery talent and salaries. And the reason for that also, why this is a very good time, because we're fortunate that Julia Reichel here, our speaker for the day, just launched with her organization, Events Research, a new battery time report. It's the second one, and we've been fortunate to support you as well through Battery Associates. And yeah, just super delighted to hear from Julia summarizing this report in the beginning. And then, of course, we can all come together and ask questions and think about what this might mean for our industry. Maybe just a quick word. Mariam, do you want to quickly introduce yourself as well?

0:53Yes, I'm Mariam. I'm co-hosting today with Simon. Thank you, Simon, for having me. And I'm co-founder of a company called Pulsanix. We make hardware to characterize batteries without interrupting operations. So, Julia, very happy to be here. Thank you, Mariam. Yeah, with this, Julia, we were going to pass it to you to maybe introduce yourself a bit, and then, of course, summarize this really exciting battery time report. Thanks, Simon. And thanks, Mariam, for having me. And welcome to everyone who is a listener of a company called Aventsy Search. We are an executive search firm in the sustainability and cleantech space with a specific focus on research-driven work. And that, for us, means two things. One is when we look for talent, we scope the market and we work in a research-driven way to identify the right people. But also, we have a research part of the business in which we generate proprietary data, so owned by Aventsy that we are able to share with the market.

2:07But where we also do benchmarking work for clients who are looking to understand the sentiments of their talent. So, Aventsy is all about data-driven decision-making in the talent acquisition and retention space. And our focus, as I said, is cleantech. But within cleantech in particular, we focus on the battery value chain. So, anything from mining, materials, refining, cell and pack production through to recycling and the application in downstream. So, I promised a bit of an introduction to myself. My background is travel and transportation. In fact, I trained as a pilot once upon a time. And since then, spent many years working in research, best practice research, around technology in the space. So, why do you research into talent in this particular sector? When we first launched Aventsys, we said, you know, we wanted to create a business that focused on cleantech and sustainability. We wanted to do the right thing. We wanted to, if you like, improve the image of the terrible, terrible image executive search firms have.

3:37So, we decided, given my background in travel and my co-founder's background as a material scientist, we decided that the battery and electrification world is where we want it to be. We soon discovered that clients were telling us about the war for talent. And no matter who you speak to, all the big organizations who have built or are building pilot and giga plans, they're all talking about launching search, sorry, recruitment campaigns by the thousands and unable to actually close some of those talent gaps. So, the researcher in me straightaway kicked into gear and said, well, anecdotal is not good enough for me. If our clients want to trust us, we need more than the sample size we can provide as an executive search firm. And we actually need to put some volume behind this. And that's what led to the launch of the first report. So, given that talent is really often at the core of delivery issues within organizations, it only moves onto the radar for senior leadership when it's gone horribly wrong, really.

4:50We wanted to do the research so that senior decision makers, both in the business and in the HR side of the business, are able to make decisions in a data-driven way and in a strategic way. So, when we did the first report, sorry, the first research project back in 21, we started building out a database of professionals and probably the listeners here remember seeing emails from me. You were probably being targeted by us. And it was interesting to see the initial reports. What we found this year is that the response rate has six-folded. So, clearly not only did it resonate with the employers, able to understand what talent actually think. And I will talk about sentiment in a minute, but also with the talent itself, the ability. Hey, I'm dissatisfied and I'm dissatisfied because that clearly resonated because with no extra marketing, we were able to secure a six-fold response rate and go into markets such as Asia and North America, which were really not reachable for us in the first iteration of this report.

6:12And Battery Associates played a key part here in increasing the reach, as did some of our industry partners, for example, the UK Big, some of the manufacturers, all of whom have been great, great supporters. So, I said I would talk about sentiment. What does talent sentiment mean and why is it important? If I tell you a little anecdote, I'm currently involved in a global initiative run through the World Tourism Council, Travel and Tourism Council. And we've done some research with the stakeholders. 80% of decision makers, business leaders there say that their businesses are currently understaffed and there's a talent issue. And all the big consulting houses go out and they continue the message that there is a talent issue. And one of the associates in this collaboration brought me on board and said, hey, Julia, can you talk to these guys? Because nobody seems to consider the position of the talent, right? Of the supply chain, of the talent. If the talent isn't coming or staying, then surely the research has got to be into why they're not coming and not staying.

7:21And that is what the talent sentiment is. Why do my people consider me a good employer? Why don't they consider me a good employer? How important is the salary to them? How important is flexible working? How important is leadership style? How often do they go and speak to recruiters? Howبد theبد theبد theبد theبد the with creating a base understanding around diversity, equality and inclusion, as well as the value of training. Those are the things that we were able to really wrap our arms around over the last two years. So for the next 10 minutes or so, I'd like to share the output of the research work and share some of the key trends. So let's start with what is the scope and why did we choose that particular scope? So from our work as an executive search firm, we knew that the highly technical talent, so the chemical engineers, the battery designers, cell designers, the hydrometallurgists, those kind of roles, the CTOs, they were the roles that inevitably ended up with us.

8:46And so they were by and large that mid to senior level roles with more than five experience, more than five years experience. And again, the priority from the perspective of our clients, sort of knocking on the 10 to 12 year experience. And then obviously the C-suite. In terms of region, we weren't able to really pinpoint where the problem lay, but we knew it was in that segment where talent were really experts in what they were doing. And they had grease under their fingernails and they came with lessons learned, but they weren't so high up in the ivory tower that they weren't operational anymore. So that's what we focused on building our database. And we collected the, or we looked for, and it's very hard work building databases. So we looked for about three, 2,500 to 3,000 individuals. And we gathered their email addresses and did contact details in their various employers. And we contacted them and we said, hey, would you reply to this survey?

10:01And in the process of building the survey and speaking to this talent, the first insights arrived with us. And the first one was no matter how senior and no matter how well educated this talent pool is, given that over 80% of PhDs and masters, the hunger for training is high. The value that is being put on further training, further development, further knowledge is extremely high. So straight away, we are able to say to a client who comes to us and says, we can't hold on to our people. We can say, well, do you offer them further training? So that was the first thing that came out for us. The second one was that diversity, equality really means a lot to this talent pool. And when we started to investigate that and look at the data, we found that women were highly under presented, if that makes sense. So women were highly under represented in the senior leadership level, as well as in the higher salary categories, even though women pound for pound had more PhDs and more master's degrees than the male contingent of the research.

11:24So it became really clear to us that equality and diversity and inclusion was something that this talent pool felt really strongly about. Next up was the obvious question of the salaries. Everybody wants insight into salaries, no matter if I'm an employer, if I am a functional leader, an HR specialist, or if I am an employee. To have a level of transparency is really useful and really important for a couple of reasons. Number one, I would like to know as an employee, am I being valued and am I being rewarded in line with what my peers are receiving in terms of monetary value? And that is to say, money isn't everything for this talent pool because it really is not. But we found that a lot of very senior people with a lot of qualifications and years of experience were paid really rather poorly. So that's probably not something the employers on this podcast want to hear. But let me flip the coin. When you are looking for a hydrometallurgist who is going to go to Indonesia, then you will and work on an expat package.

13:02You will probably find that you end up after much search work with two or three people that really can do the job and are willing to do the job. Now, what happens if two of those say, actually, I've changed my mind, then you're left with one and that one person can demand the salary of their choice. So if you as an employer are able to say, this is the range and we're willing to put you on the top end of the range, but not because this is our corporate salary band, but because this is what your peers are earning and this is what we're willing to pay, it puts you in a more powerful position. So what we then did this year is we started to look at the satisfaction level with the salary. So we asked specifically, have your salaries gone up or down in the last 12 months and how satisfied are you with that salary level? And has your satisfaction changed in the last 12 months?

14:08And again, I'll share the output with that shortly. The next section is really about their willingness to stay with you as an organization or to engage with you as a potentially new employer. And the reason that is important is we we speak to our candidates regularly, especially when we're in the middle of a search program. And they say to us a lot of the time, oh, God, I had three calls from headhunters today and two of them really didn't know what they were talking about. And the third one really didn't research me particularly well and I didn't want to talk to them. So we know that this talent pool is being targeted fairly aggressively from in-house recruitment teams as well as external organizations like us. But last year, what we saw was that they were quite latent. They were not interested in sending their CV. They were not particularly interested in doing anything about it, even though they were looking. So we were again interested in how has your behavior changed over the last 12 months.

15:29So last year, just over 50 percent told us that they were looking at job boards on a weekly or monthly basis. And this time around, it has increased. So interesting statistics there happening. So this year we are looking over 76 percent, for example, looking at the market, the employer market on a weekly or monthly basis. And 79 percent of them say, for example, that we have been I have been contacted by an executive recruitment search firm in the last 12 months. Now think about that 79 percent of the people you work with have taken a call from a headhunter. They're not looking, but they're being targeted. So there is a huge amount of movement to be anticipated. So so then the last item we looked at was the employer satisfaction. So how satisfied are you employed with you? It's with you. Sorry. How satisfied are you with your employer overall? And how has that changed over the last year? So that was the background of the research.

16:43So let me give you the scope. So we had a reach into all the geographies, even though the African subcontinent was significantly underrepresented. So if Africa is an area you're interested in and you've read the report, I would say get in touch because we need to treat those numbers with some care. 70 percent of our, sorry, 74 percent of the respondents were full time employed and 16 percent part time employed. The majority of 63 percent were male. And 48 percent have been in the battery sector for between five and 10 years. And 31 percent stated that they had been there of up to five years. And then obviously the remaining 10 years and above from a seniority level. So again, you know, to say, am I moving in the right peer group here? 42 percent were at management level and 27 percent at director and then 90 percent at VPNC level. And then the remainder were what we up to now classed as other. We will be breaking that out into more segmentable data next time round.

18:01Specifically also we're going to look at the departments so we can start breaking out which areas, you know, is it manufacturing? Is it R&D? Is it, you know, which function are these these this talent working in? And from an educational status that is slightly lower than last year, 63 percent stated that they had a master's or a PhD. So I've talked for 20 minutes already and I'm just getting to the key trends. So I'm going to give you an overview here. So we found that 70 percent of people stated that their benefits had increased compared to last year. However, what we found quite notable is that the benefit most people receive is health care and that's still only just over 40 percent. So that raises a question for me on how well our constituents, our employees are being looked after. Health care, it should be or is the top benefit, obviously. And then we have other items like pension, car allowance, share options, life insurances.

19:19And all of those are below 40 percent and then dropping to below 30 percent. So that's interesting. What's interesting is that the benefits increase was slightly higher in the female sector section and was highest overall in eastern excuse me in the Middle East with North America showing the slowest increase. Moving on to salaries. So here again, we have some really interesting trends. Higher the amount of respondents that told us that their salary was higher now than last year was over 50 percent. And the region that reported the highest increase is Africa. And I would like to take that out. So again, if you have the report in front of you, I ask you to not look at the Africa graph of the US, because as I said, it's not enough data from that particular segment. So Western and Central Europe showed the highest salary increase. If I consider the work we're doing in travel and transportation, Western and Central Europe is the key area where employers are struggling to attract talent.

20:36So no surprise there. In terms of the seniority, it was the management level that had the highest increases and the C-suite the lowest increases. If we break it by gender, females had a slightly, sorry, females reported a higher degree of decrease in salary. So let me rephrase this. More women reported that they had their salary decreased than males overall. So moving on to the satisfaction then. From a satisfaction point of view, the majority of people are equally satisfied. And with about 40 percent stating that they were more satisfied. And really where I want to spend a little bit of time on now is the dissatisfied section, because this is where the 79 percent of people being called by headhunters become really significant. If you are an employer. So this is the group that we call to be at flight risk. So the most dissatisfied by region again is Africa. I ask you to discard that for the minute. So the most dissatisfied region after that is Asia Pacific.

22:01And the most dissatisfied by seniority is the non-leadership role. So the roles that we clustered under other. And that's why it's so important that in the next research cycle, we break this out and get more segmented information. And it's very interesting. But think about this. Nearly 30 percent of your main crew employees report that they're dissatisfied with their salary. And that tells me that that is potentially causing disruption to your operation and your production. What is very interesting, given that I just talked about the fact that females reported a higher decrease, the most dissatisfied section was actually the male section. So women appear to be maybe putting up, I'm doing air quotes, which you can't see, than males. Then the next section we wanted to look at was, well, what happens with counter offers? Obviously, this is a popular action when a valuable team member leaves, which again leaves me open as an employer to this unchallenged salary conversation. You know, I increase the salary by 30%, will you stay?

23:26Well, that sends a message across the entire organisation and puts me in the light for some ungoverned, potentially ungoverned salary conversations. What's interesting is, is that the majority, in fact, would consider a counter offer. Only 40% said too little, too late. Main reasons for leaving an employer has moved. And again, there's a little bit of time spent on this. Last year, when we had primarily a European contingent in responses, the main reason to leave the employer was focusing on the leadership style of the business and the purpose that the talent attached to their work. This year, with a global reach that has shifted and the top reason to consider leaving has now become the salary. That said, when we look at why are you attracted to an employer, it is the modern and flexible leadership that attracts employees to your business. So, when you think about how you position yourself as a business, your employer branding becomes really important here to show that you're a modern, decentralised organisation.

24:50Okay, next up, then diversity. We asked how diverse do you think the business is and the industry is? And what was interesting is that the industry shaped up better than the individual employers, with over just under 60% of respondents stating that they felt their employer was as diverse as expected, or more diverse. When we asked about the industry, that was edging into 70%. Great. The last item I think I want to cover before I head into questions and debate is this willingness to engage with the market. Again, I want to highlight this being at flight risk. So, over 80% told us that they are more willing this year, as in the research was done in 2022, that they were more willing this year to participate in job search and engage with the job market than the year before. And 46% told us that they check what's going on on the job market monthly and 16% check weekly. So, the majority of employees check career pages and job boards regularly. And their sentiment is that they're much more willing to engage. What has also shifted is their actual action. So, last year, I said earlier that the talent pool was latent. This year, we see that only 28% of the overall pot of respondents said that they hadn't actually done anything. So, 72% have sent applications, have interviewed, and have turned down offers, or have not turned down offers, as it might be.

26:57So, 79% told us that they were approached by headhunting firms, and 60% told us that that made them engage in the process for selection. So, I want to say that again. 79% of your people are being targeted by headhunters, and 60% of those engage in the process of selection as a result. So, this is great news if you're in the business of hiring and expanding, and your talent acquisition is your number one strategic objective. It's really not good news if you are looking to retain your people. So, last but not least, and I sort of covered this in my overview, is the value of training. I said that nearly 90, over 90% told us that ongoing training is of personal value, as well as employer value. But what I found staggering personally is that the value of further training in senior leadership, so directors, VPs, and C-level, is extremely high. So, 29% of the people who stated that they felt training was ongoing training for themselves was of real importance were in that senior leadership side of things. And given that these are highly experienced, highly paid, and highly educated staff members and leaders, I found that really very interesting. So, even at senior leadership, training and developing is regarded extremely highly.

28:44So, Simon, that was my 25-minute whistle-stop tour of the data we've uncovered. And I obviously want to encourage everyone who's listening to get in touch and get a copy of the report, because there's huge amounts of numbers flying around. And also, I might not have taken out the segments that are particularly interesting for you. And what we're able to do is we are able to pull out data sets for clients to say, to help them understand what exactly is going on in their region or where they're feeling the pain. So, yeah, we want to make sure that this data gets absorbed and used. We want it on every, in every boardroom, we want it in every HR department. We produce this for free, because we believe this is so crucial to be able to bring this transparency. So, Simon, over to you with questions. Simon Sorgerson Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. And also, for anybody who's listening live, you can also find the link to download the report here in the chat. Or if you listen to this as a podcast, as a recording, you can also find the link in the show notes. Great. Yeah, I mean, as I said, lots and lots of interesting data in there. And of course, also, we ended on the training, which of course, most of you are passionate about, as you know, is the BatteryMBA. And of course, we're fortunate that you took it yourself and also have been so kind to a sponsor, actually, scholarships on that as well, which I think is super well received. And as you said, also, I find quite interesting the data you shared about the value of training and for the training also for leadership and director level. As you said, about a third or so, 30% or so, which of course, we very much believe in. That's why we also do the BatteryMBA and similar programs.

30:31Maybe one question I would like to start with, I find just really interesting, because you spoke about the complexity and how you want this information to be out there, etc. I was wondering, have you also looked into maybe different strategies, you know, between more like startup level, because of course, there's a lot of startups also coming, we're talking maybe fast growing, you know, medium sized company versus the big, you know, companies out there as well, and corporates, maybe some different strategies or different things you have seen work more officially on either level. Yeah, it's a really good question, Simon. In last year's data collection, we did ask about the size of the business. We didn't do that this year, because we felt that it might be off putting from the perspective of the size of the business. We are a small community of businesses, right? And we didn't want to put respondents into a place where they didn't feel comfortable responding. I think for next year, absolutely, we will put that back in the report has gained a life of its own, you know, it has gained a brand in itself. And I'm delighted to see that there's a recruitment company out of the US who's now copying us and trying to do something similar, as my old boss used to say, you know, a market with competition is a good market. So I'd be interested to see what they will produce. But no, we kept, we kept that segment out this year. And we also kept the the salary bands quite broad, so that nobody would abandon the response or to be actually, you know what, this is uncomfortable, I don't want to answer that. What I can say is that we tend to get engaged, I would say, ever so slightly more with the SME sector and the startups and the corporates. And that's an interesting situation to be in. So when you consider that a startup firm that might have just had, you know, somewhere in the region between 50 and 120 million dollars of funding that they end a chunk of that with an executive search partner like us. But of course, they are very driven and they have no appetite for failure. They need these people in place, they need them in place by the state, and they need to be the right people who come in and hit the ground running with lessons learned with the gray hairs to show, to say, do this and don't do that. So the appetite to go after the right people and actually pay bigger salaries is bigger in the startup segment than it is in the corporate segment. So that's the first thing I would say.

33:36With the corporates, what we find is when they ask to work with us is when they are actively rebranding themselves from that dirt producing legacy company. You know, they might be mining, they might be from the chemical sector, they might be oil and gas. If they're looking to move into this space, there's two things. Number one, their talent is the biggest segment that is moving across quite naturally. So we don't need to go after oil and gas or chemicals people, they are doing that by themselves. But those kind of businesses who are actively rebranding themselves, rewriting their mission statements and their value sets, they come to us and help us ask us for support. I hope that answers your question. Great. Now that's super helpful. Thanks so much Julia. And thanks for sharing those context there. Mariam, would you like to ask a question? Julia, I would like to zoom in on the statistic that you mentioned, which is that the most dissatisfied segment are highest in non-leadership positions.

34:52Can you explain a little bit more what non-leadership positions means? Does that mean non-C suite? And then also, are there any reasons why necessarily that is the most dissatisfied segment? Is it more that they're not getting enough training or is it that the salaries are not competitive enough? Good question. So let me define leadership. It's really interesting, this question, Mariam, because over and over we get asked that. And so clearly, we need to be clear about this. So we look at the org chart in terms of the following structure, C-level, VP level, director level, management and supervisory level, and then non-leadership. So anyone who might have listened to my joined webinar with the German consulting company working with the German government, VDE, VDI, the other thing that I think is, is that the reason why it was really interesting because they had super data broken out in a very different way, which made it really interesting to compare our data sets. For us, we stick to this and, you know, again, we welcome any feedback from the market. You know, if the listeners are telling us, hey, this makes better sense for us, if you break it out this way, then we can do that. The idea behind of this was that we want to get a clear picture of that technical segment, that subject matter expert who is not interested, or maybe is interested in moving across into a leadership track in order to get the higher salary versus becoming more deeply knowledgeable and more deeply experienced in his or her specific field. And so that's why we defined it in, do you have, do you have people responsibility? Are you at this level or are you not? So, but as I said, I think it's really important that on the next research cycle, we go deeper on breaking out the segment of other.

37:08So, when you then look at the dissatisfaction levels, the answer is no, we don't understand it yet. And it will require some either dedicated survey work or some targeted stakeholder interviewing. My sense is that dissatisfaction happens, as we know from the research, when I'm not happy with my direct leader in front of me, when I'm not working for a business that is aligned with my values and my ethos, when I feel I am micromanaged, and when I feel I don't get paid enough. So salary comes in fourth on this particular scale. So, of course, the possibility that I feel a combination of any of those four things is much higher in what I call the main crew. This is a leftover from my airline days. The main crew, so the people who are no leadership and people responsibilities, who are deeply in their projects, who are getting plants up and running, who are putting machinery in, who are designing cell packs, who are, you know, mixing away in the clean room, because they don't have sight so much of the company strategy, the company issues, maybe around funding, and they have that direct supervisory person in front of them that they may or may not get on with. They may also feel I haven't had a pay rise in two years.

38:55They are much more subject to this kind of kaleidoscope of dissatisfaction growing. And now you bundle on top of that, that they get called by headhunders saying, hey, do you know your skill is in demand? And suddenly, their dissatisfaction rises. But as I said, this is anecdotal from our insights into speaking to candidates every day. And I personally would like to put some data behind that in 2023 to understand exactly what leads to the dissatisfaction. So it's a really good question. So Julia, just to follow up on that, because, you know, typically, the value system and the standards and the mission and vision statement of a company, does that play a role at all in terms of employment, employee loyalty? Because you did mention that statistic that 79% of the talent pool is being headhunted, 60% of those choose to engage. And that seems like a very high number in terms of, you know, the talent pool basically being able to access opportunities in different countries over a very short period of time. So, yeah, how strongly does the value system and mission statement and vision of the company play a role? Personally, I think it is the be all and end all. And I'm speaking here as an entrepreneur who is building out a business myself, where, you know, why did I, I gave up a big corporate career, you know, with a big six figure salary and the corner office and the VP title, and I decided to start a headhunting business one day. And so my personal view was that I wasn't travel, I was working on putting more people on planes. And whenever I sat in front of IALTA or my peers and other technology firms or the GDS providers, and I said, hey, guys, I don't buy into this doubling passenger numbers by 2030. I want to half them. Because, you know, we can't carry on like this.

41:20It was so extreme, how my value set clashed with my with my paycheck. You know, we were as a household, we were living not non package, my daughter was going to an anthropomorphic soft we call school. You know, we were living in the countryside. And so my value set clashed with my salary check to a point where I couldn't justify doing my job any longer and put everything on the line to create a business that aligned with my value set. And when I look at my research data, I see the same thing emerging. So the reason for being satisfied with the employer is flexibility, number one, number two, the sustainability focus of the business, number three, career path, number four, salary. When I look at the dissatisfied section, why are you dissatisfied? Salary, leadership style, and because we haven't broken out the mission, the values, separately, apart from the sustainability focus, which comes in high up, we can wrap the all of those items, the mission, the values and the ethos into the leadership style, because the leader, obviously the leadership level have to buy into this. We get a really clear picture that that is the number two stroke, number two, edging into number one reason for dissatisfaction.

43:06So that's my personal story. And as I said, I see the same in the research data. Great. Thank you so much for sharing, Julia. And also, now we want to give an opportunity for anybody else to ask questions for free to also either come up stage or put in the chat as well. Otherwise, we also have a few more questions. But yeah, if you have any question about salaries or career progressions, any of these topics, Julia is a fantastic person to ask, because she, as you can tell, she's very passionate about it. But also, she has a lot of numbers and a research to back up lots of these things. So, but also anecdotes as well, which can also be helpful. So yeah, just want to encourage you all, if there's anything for free to bring, come up on stage, or ask questions in the chat as well. We're happy to have you here as well. Otherwise, maybe we can, yeah, we're just going to give a moment, but also otherwise, maybe you want to ask more question about career progression.

43:58Yeah, Julia, you didn't mention an interesting point about the career growth being one of the priorities of the talent pool. And that got me wondering if also leaving your current employer, going to a different employer, you're seeing a trend that people are doing that for perhaps better titles or more larger responsibilities. And they're able to do that if they leave the employer they're currently with. Yeah, it's again, it's a really interesting question. And yes, it's the answer. So people, so it depends on their personal drivers. Let me start with that. The personal drivers are inevitably, I want to do the right thing. I want to be involved in a sustainable organisation. I want to drive electrification. Number two, I need to feed my family. So money is important. And number four, three, sorry, number two, and number three, I feel I am ready for the next step. Now, the focus here is the I feel because what we see quite a lot is this inflation of the title. So we are in a fast growth sector. And we only have a definitive pool that everybody can fish out of and find the best talent. We actively encourage our clients to go into alternative markets and consider where is the skill set and the experiences relatable enough. So this is somebody who can come in and hit the ground running to a certain degree. But the upskilling is minimal.

45:48Because when you take somebody who is super ambitious, super smart, has studied a lot and has done his or her first two or three positions, and you suddenly accelerate that person's career path in a way that is, it doesn't need to be linear, but not in line with their ability to develop and grow into this kind of new role. Then you set not only your business up for an element of failure, but crucially that person. So if that person is overwhelmed by the decisions they're supposed to make, overwhelmed by suddenly going from being a subject matter expert with deep technical expertise to running a team of 20 or 30, when they're overwhelmed with making large budgetary decisions, then you are really setting that person up for failure. So we never encourage our clients or our candidates to go up more than one step in the career career path. And even then a move in less than two years, we don't see that working very well for the talent or the company. It's a short term strategy, and it leads to salary inflation, it leads to title inflation, and it leads to an unstable workforce. So that would be my thoughts around that.

47:30And it's a really fine line because you want for your staff to feel valued, you show them the career path, you want ambitious driven people who are not afraid to create change. But what you've got to ask yourself is, can you give them the infrastructure of support? Do you have a mentorship program in your business? Do you have the ability to cut them slack if they make big mistakes? Do you have enough quality assurance of that person's work to say somebody senior still overseeing them? So not mentorship in the sense of, hey, you could try this or that, but actually still managing that person, supervising that person. So those are the things you need to ask yourself if you're looking at fast tracking somebody fast tracking can work really, really well. From a retention perspective, it is a valuable strategy. But you would really need to handpick the people you do this with and give them a lot of support. Vice versa, if you're taking somebody out of their current position, the same applies. Plus, you now have the challenge that this is not somebody who's embedded in the organization. So can you give that person the time to become part, to absorb the company DNA and become part of the company DNA so that they can act efficiently and effectively in this new higher role with this new team?

49:07One of the coaches who talks about implanting the cheetah's heart into the elephant. Is this person different enough to create the change that you need? Or is he or she not too different to be chewed up and spat out in the shortest time? Great. Thank you. Super, super interesting insights. And also, I think very relevant for anybody in their career and how to progress through it in a more sufficient way. And as you said, short-term, long-term gains, very, very valid points. I think this is probably one of the last chances for anybody to ask questions. I wrote with a few of you who might have some. So I just want to invite you now, if you want to still ask a question. If not, that's of course fine as well. I'm sure we can also reach out to Julia directly as well afterwards. But I just want to encourage you, if you want to ask any questions, now might be a good time before we close today's session. Otherwise, also maybe one last question from me to Julia, just thinking, you know, maybe what's one thing you could, and we already shared some of it, but maybe, you know, if you could give, you know, any final thoughts on one for the employer, one for the talent, you know, maybe what are some, you know, some, some good strategies you have observed, any tips you can, you know, just pass on to these two groups? Oh gosh, that's a difficult question on a Sunday night, Simon. You know, from the talent's perspective, network, network, network, network, go to every event, go to every podcast, go to every webinar that you can and network. The kind of talent we're talking about here, we'll find probably, and I don't want to draw up some big, big assumptions here, but the commercial people in the world network very well, and they do this quite naturally as part of their, their skill set and their modus operandi. Deep technical people tend to not enjoy networking very much. And what that means is that really, you miss out on peer exchange, on being able to soundcheck when a headhunter calls you. I think there's nothing worse than being told, hey, you would be a really good fit for this role and not being able to call up somebody you've met at a conference or who you're connected with on LinkedIn and says, and to say, hey, is this right? You know, and what's the manager like in this role? You know, what's been the challenge wise, the person leaving? So I think network speak to anyone and everyone in this industry that you can, it's we're a small pond, we're a small group of people by relative terms. And so to give each other that support, I think it is of extremely high value. It also sets you up for a potential leadership track. I have a lovely story to tell, but I won't tell it today about how I resigned out of British Airways once upon a time. So Simon, remind me another time, but network. So that is my, my one piece of advice to talent, so to employees. For employers, I would say, take the data that we produce and benchmark. Don't assume you know how your people are feeling. We are producing this data.

52:35As I said, we're still doing this for free, it might change. I think it's a big change. Because we are making a payable service available to benchmark. And when I say benchmark, what I mean is, go in and really encourage an open dialogue culture in your organization, so that when you come with a survey, people feel confident that they can tell you the truth. Because you want to know the truth about how your people feel about working for you. Only when you can you look the truth in the eye, can you build strategies to deal with the bits that need attention. Don't go down the path of thinking I will just offer better salaries. That's not what this talent pool is all about. So use the data that we produce and benchmark internally. And look where your areas are where you you can engage better with your existing employees to drive retention. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Julia. I think both of you are excellent tips. I think we have one more question from Philip. Philip, would you like to ask a question? Philip, you mute at the moment in case you're speaking. There we go.

53:44Ah, okay. Now I found a button. You can hear me now? Yes. Nice to meet you, Philip. Okay. So thank you, Julia, for the nice presentation. And I have maybe a short question. I'm working for a big university in Germany. And we try to find people. So we are, we have an open job for a technology transfer officer in the battery field. But as university, we can't pay as much as industry can. So it's really hard to find good people for for interesting jobs. So we have an excellent class excellence cluster in post lithium, but we don't find people. Yeah. So, so yeah. So your question is, how do you find? So I think, I think there is, there is, this is such a growth market. And as I said, talent is being pursued and hounded by, by the executive search firms and the recruiters. And big salaries are being waived in front of this talent, right? So to your point, salary might well be a challenge.

54:58So I think there is something more strategic than that. And we find this a lot when we take, when candidates, when we try and take candidates who have been scholars, and bring them back into the industry. And that is that employers are by and large, fairly hesitant to bring scholars back, or bring scholars into the commercial world, because there is a a worry that somebody who has dedicated their life to research and teaching, that they may find it really difficult to operate in a fast paced and commercial environment, which is, of course, what the battery industry is, it's extremely fast paced, it's high pressure, funding rounds are being closed left, right and centre. And so I think there's the perception of a mismatch. So that, so when you take a step back for you as a university, you will probably struggle to attract really good people, because they're worried that then they are being fixed on this path. And then and then what that means is you narrow the amount of talent you can attract, because this is a very specific passion you have to have, and to leave your, you know, to either choose this from the word go or to leave a commercial career behind.

56:31So I think that's probably what sits at the core of it. Philip, I would like to offer you get in touch with us because we have, as a company, we have it written into our constitution that you do we do a certain amount of pro bono work. And if we can help you, then I would like to offer that to you that we have a conversation and we can see if we can help you get some good people in front of you for for interviews. So you can you can grab my email address of our website, which is our Vences.org. And I'd love to have a conversation if we can help you with our pro bono fund. Thank you, Julia, for this really great offer. Yeah, I will talk to my colleagues and then we will come back to you. Great. Look forward to hearing from you. Fantastic. Thank you. And maybe, yeah, we will even help, you know, some people out here, you know, how better to end a podcast.

57:27Better to end a podcast. This is kind of closing. And yeah, as mentioned, and also the link here is in the in the chat also in the show notes, if you listen to this recording. And with this, maybe I just want to do a big, big thank you to Julia for sharing all these insights. And of course, it's wonderful also to partner with you, Julia, in all of this report as well. But also, yeah, I mean, all the tremendous work you're doing to bring more transparency into this market, which I think is very appreciated by both ends, right? As you said, the employer end, but also the talent end. So, you know, just be the big thanks to that and also big thanks for you to be here today with us and share all of your insights with all of our listeners. Yeah. And thanks for the opportunity, Simon. Obviously, we we value the partnership with Battery Associates a lot. We feel equally that you guys do amazing things. And I've been through your program. I've done the BatteryMBA and I thought it was amazing learning.

58:17And, you know, above all, like a good MBA should, it provided me with such an amazing network. So, yeah, it gave me great confidence to be operating in this market better. So, yeah, anyone who's out there, I'm doing a little pitch for BatteryMBA now. But, you know, it's we we feel that this partnership around understanding talent sentiment and supporting talent and supporting employers is really important. So thanks for giving me the platform to speak to new contacts and hopefully get our data more digested out there in the market. Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Julia. Much appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Have a good day. Good evening. Thank you, Julia. Thank you, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Bye.