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Native Spanish Speakers Drive Results at ECS
ECS Solutions (ECS) continually evolves to respond to the needs of our clients. In many cases, this is evident in the form of new services or specialized training and certifications to address changing technology. Another area where we have placed considerable emphasis over the last decade is diversity within the ranks of the ECS team. Specifically, we have placed marked effort into growing the number of our native Spanish-speaking teammates.
According to the US Department of Labor, the overall composition of Hispanic workers grew from 8.5% in 1990 to 18% in 2020. They project that this will be over 21% of the overall workforce by 2030. In 2020 Hispanic workers already made up more than 25% of the total workforce in six states including key agricultural locations like California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the number of Hispanic workers in management jobs more than doubled to over 10% today from just over 5% in 2000.
These trends matter to us at ECS. Yes, the Spanish-speaking workforce remains in high concentration in industries like farming and fishing & forestry as well as a strong presence in maintenance and construction. However, increasingly, workers from this population segment are expanding their educational footprint and appearing more frequently as supervisors, managers, and engineers in manufacturing. Given their higher concentration where many domestic food products are grown and subsequently processed, this means that our team is collaborating more and more frequently with this demographic in not only operational roles but with people in management, project management, and project execution.
We have made a concerted effort to grow our team to support this segment of the market. Today, native Spanish-speaking personnel comprise more than 25% of ECS’ total workforce. Perhaps equally as important is that they are present in multiple numbers in nearly every role within our company including sales, programming, project management, and senior company management. We now have multiple teammates in this demographic residing throughout Latin America as well as many who have relocated to sites within the US.
SCADA packages have long had the ability to switch languages on the fly and, like many integrators, we leveraged that within our deployed human-machine interfaces. Those capabilities did nothing to address specific dialects at the operator level or, even more importantly, to provide a platform for a plant to leverage its staff’s deeper talents during a complete project lifecycle. The diversity within our team allows us to apply personnel in the appropriate roles within a project, up to and including nearly every role on a team, to match the requirements and capabilities of our client’s teams.
Clients appreciate being able to include additional teammates from the outset of a project. Without the need for a translator, all their staff can participate from original brainstorming through to specification, quote, and during-project reviews. This level of engagement drives enthusiasm amongst their teams and drives better performance once a system is deployed. From subtle nuance points that angle towards a dialect, for example, to profound contributions by folks who may have been overlooked otherwise, their teammates enjoy working on our projects.
We intend to continue our growth in this segment as demanded by our clients. We now feature teammates in leadership positions in multiple Latin American countries and we leverage affiliate firms as strategic partners from within the same region. The diversity of our team fuels collaboration on a level that we wouldn’t be able to achieve without it. As our client base grows in those international regions or in areas with the continental US, we will continue to expand in this regard.
The output of American industry has always reflected the rich and diverse talents of the members of the workforce. The most successful companies have integrated not only for skin color but for the talents and capabilities of their entire workforce. As the complexion of the workforce continues to change then ECS will adapt as well to address client demands in a forward-thinking manner.