Largest Columbus employers have more than 240 job openings

Bartholomew County’s five largest nongovernment employers have more than 240 open positions in Columbus, primarily for professional employees including software and design engineers and mechanical engineering drafting technicians.

Cummins Inc., the county’s largest employer, with 7,400, has 165 openings for professional employees ">Vehicle Diagnostic equipment. The company has open positions for, among others, an embedded software engineer, a product quality engineer and a transmission gear, shaft and bearing specialist.

“The challenge has been traditionally engineers,” said Janet Williams, director of corporate communications.

Cummins and other local employers have said they’re struggling to find enough qualified engineers for open positions, in part because they have to make up for retiring baby boomers while at the same time recruiting more engineers in response to global growth.

Dorel Juvenile Group employs 827 at its facility on State Street, and has 11 openings for salaried employees, including five design engineers. The company makes child-safety equipment, focusing primarily on child-safety seats. Tim Ferguson, executive vice president for human resources, said the company is having a tough time finding design engineers, who would be charged with designing the next generation of car seats.

Dorel prefers engineers with three to five years of experience and often recruits from the automotive industry, Ferguson said. But luring experienced employees away from established careers is difficult. “People don’t want to move these days,” he said.

For its recruiting, Dorel relies heavily on LinkedIn, a professional network that, according to its website, has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and territories. The high-tech design process, which involves computing the stresses to which the seats and crash test dummies are exposed, can take up to two years from conception to production, Ferguson said.

NTN, which employs 1,700, has 50 openings, including management, maintenance and production, said Barry E. Parkhurst, vice president of administration. NTN makes bearings and constant velocity joints at its campus in Woodside Industrial Park, near Walesboro.

Parkhurst said hourly maintenance positions have proved challenging to fill.

The company will host a job fair on its campus, at 8251 S. International Drive, from 4 to 6 p.m. Wednesday to fill about 45 hourly positions.

Faurecia employs about 1,500 in Bartholomew County, and has 14 openings, ranging from commodity purchasing to production supervisor and IT technician intern.

Faurecia is an automotive supplier focusing on emissions control systems. Based in France, its local operations include a manufacturing plant on Gladstone Avenue and a technical center on Road 450S.

Aluminum wheel maker Enkei America Inc., also in Woodside Industrial Park, has openings for a quality engineer and an IT programmer. Both positions have been open for three months, said Nikki Baker Lushin, human resources manager.

She said depending on the position auto-diagnostic-tool-cid90">Auto diagnostic tool, the company will recruit from college, but Enkei prefers a quality engineer with automotive background. High competition for such candidates makes hiring difficult, she said.

Enkei also has weekly openings for production workers, she said. Those are hired exclusively through Elwood Staffing in Columbus.