Your future is changing - are you ready?

Recently GE announced that they are laying off 12,000 people in their Electric Power division. That is a big blow to those people, and will reverberate across the industry. How will it affect you?

First, you should remember that GE is a relatively bloated company, and has been for years. That's the nature of what they are, a giant conglomerate. They have been working recently to solve some of these problems, and this time it was the Power division's turn.

Second, even though that is the case, if the power industry was growing they may not be making this decision. They specifically pointed out that contraction in the industry due to a number of factors was a big part of it. Those factors being ones we all know, namely the phasing out of coal and the excess capacity of gas, due to the buildout over the last few years.

Given this, they still have cut all those jobs, and it is a big red flag to many. If you are a company servicing big iron types of plants, it will affect you. Possibly not right now, but in both the medium- and long-term future it will.

The signal to get from this is how your clients will react. They need to keep running in the short term, so those services shouldn't be affected. Having said that, if you service older equipment, you might find clients less likely to want that service, as it heads toward end-of-life. Why spend money on a turbine that's going to be shut down in five years? If you don't service it and it breaks down in four years, you may feel that's a tradeoff worth taking.

For the longer term, how will your company handle these changes? If GE is not installing as many systems, in the future there will not be as much work for you to perform on them. This can range from general maintenance to complete overhauls, which means you must be planning for that long-term cycle.

So who will survive? Work will still be there, but less of it. Some service companies will disappear. The survivors will be those who recognize the coming problems and plan for them. That may be in managing costs, people, or locations. It will be in positioning themselves as the appropriate solution. Demonstrating your knowledge and proving your long-term value to clients is a process that you should be undertaking now.