This article from The Utica Observer Dispatch rehashes the often heard mantra about the lack of trained folks to fill manufacturing jobs.
“Some manufacturers say that number could be higher, but the existing labor pool doesn’t have the skills to do the job and there aren’t enough training programs for workers to learn new skills.”
A tip of the hat to reader David Foster, who writes on Chicago Boyz, as well as on his own blog – Photon Courier - for the link to the site that contained this photo and other spectacular ones like it.
These shots of women doing serious manufacturing work building what were at the time, extremely high tech airplanes, and doing so in staggering numbers beg the question: How is it that they were able to do so with such high success, but today jobs go unfilled because we can’t train people?
You know that most of the ladies in these photos weren’t doing these obs just months before the pictures were taken; and you also know they aren’t graduates of years long trade school and apprentice programs.
While the school in Utica moans: ”Education officials say they do have the programs, but the skills manufacturers need change more quickly than the education programs do.”
Seems to me the problem is not that manufacturing skills are changing too fast so much as it is the schools – and employers – don’t know their history.
TWI – Training Within Industry – is how these women became skilled in short order. It is how Toyota developed their work force. The TWI folks refer to the process that created this trained workforce – perhaps the competitive weapon that did more to win World War II than anything else – as “the most under-rated achievement of the 20th century“. I believe they are right.
Instead of whining about the lack of workers and waiting for the government to do something about it, manufacturing leadership might want to think about giving that “under-rated achievement” a serious look.
About Bill Waddell
Thanks for the links, Bill!
I think one difference from the 1940s case is this…most of these women would have learned basic math skills, including the ability to work with fractions and decimals, in the public schools.
I’ve seen quite a few comments from manufacturing people about the difficulty in finding workers who can read a micrometer or even a ruler…mentioned this to a guy who teaches landscaping at a community college and he said he’d had the same experience.
It would be easy to the point of triviality to teach someone ruler-reading if s(he) hadn’t done it before but *did* know fractions, and only slightly harder to teach micrometer-reading to someone who already knew decimals and fractions. But what if their K-12 education had been so bad they had no idea how to add 2 1/2 to 3 1/4, or 1.0023 to 2.2025?
I do think companies should be more willing to train in job-specific skills, and the WWII example proves it can be done reasonably quickly and on a very large scale…but is it really feasible for companies to go back and fill the gaps in an education that was supposed to extend over 12 years?
Also, re the Rome Specialty guy who said: “You have to know tool-and-die manufacturing, but you also have to be able to program and reprogram the computers”
…I seriously doubt if his shop-floor people are really writing computer programs in the sense of C++ code or whatever; surely he is talking about CNC programming or maybe programmable logic controller programming. It seems to me that anyone who understands the manufacturing process in question and also has basic math and literacy skills..plus a certain level of intelligence and curiosity..should be able to learn CNC or PLC programming reasonably quickly.