The bar is being raised

The bar for entry level workers continues to be raised. This is one reason why the economic recovery will be prolonged. Many unemployed are unprepared for the skilled jobs that exist and others are over-prepared for jobs that don't exist. Our society and our systems of secondary and higher education must adjust.

If you read my entries last month, you know that I was sailing. While heading South on the Potomac, after a stop in Alexandria to visit with some PMMI colleagues, I received a call from the North American Vice-president for operations of a German company that has manufacturing operations here. He was calling to ask me if I knew of any graduating students from mechatronics education programs that his company could recruit for ENTRY LEVEL OPERATORS.

Unfortunately, there are very few community college students in these programs who weren't already employed when they entered the program. I was able to direct him to a high school with a mechatronics and industrial maintenance program that could have some students available with basic mechanical, electrical and PLC skills. However, many of these high school students graduate from these vo-tech programs with the intent of continuing on to a community or 4-year college.

Other companies are looking for mechatronics students with associates degrees to fill their entry level maintenance positions. They are having trouble finding them. My piece this month on "good times for packaging machinery" mentions the difficulty of obtaining reliable and skilled labor as a driver for automation. These companies that are about to embark upon automation programs will be willing to send a couple of existing employees for advanced training or to hire a couple of degreed individuals to serve as maintenance technicians. In the big picture, this is a small price to pay to have world-class manufacturing and packaging operations.

The bar for entry level jobs in manufacturing has been raised. Our society has not adjusted to the idea that entry level manufacturing jobs will go to people with some post-secondary education and possibly associate degrees in technology. We haven't adjusted to think that people with 2 and 4 year technical degrees will be the gold-collar emplyees filling the first, second, third or swing shift jobs in industrial maintenance. We need to adjust our thinking and our educational systems to these new realities. Someone moved our cheese!

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Comments I am a packaging systems sales engineer that has been selling packaging machinery for over 25 years and have convinced people that they can increase productivity by automation. The best way to keep from losing all production from the U.S.A. is to automate! If you know of anyone looking to grow their machine sales please let me know? Good article and I agree totally! Respectfully, Bill Ward Packaging Systems Sales Engineer Posted by: William F. Ward on July 30, 2010 Interesting to discover that entry level positions are require significantly more experienced individuals. With technology advancing it is certainly becoming a requirement. Great post thanks. Posted by: Packaging Jobs on November 29, 2010 Post a comment (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) Name: Email Address: URL: Remember personal info? Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style) Type the word 'packaging' (required):