Education and Training for Manufacturing Careers

Finding adequately trained workers for manufacturing operations is not just an issue in the US. I was invited to travel to the Ontario Centres of Excellence Discovery 11 Conference in Toronto to share what I and my colleagues have learned about developing and delivering education and training programs for advanced manufacturing in the US. Following my presentation, I was asked if my remarks were available to the audience, so I have decided to share them here with all of the readers of OnTheEdgeBlog.com.

Sharing the panel with me were Bruce Seely, President of Tiercel Technology Corporation; Ihor Stech, Vice-President Global Operations, Christie Digital Systems; Darren Lawless, Dean of Research, Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning; and Scott Sheely, Executive Director, Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board. More information, and eventually a video of the presentations, will be available at www.ocediscovery.com.

My remarks were as follows:

To state my premise in the terms of today's keynote speakers, process innovation has allowed us to maintain a rather significant production economy in South Central Pennsylvania. Twenty percent of the workforce remains employed in manufacturing. We now need innovation in our education processes to be able to sustain the production economy that we have.

We aren't just facing a likely skill shortage as is suggested in the description of this panel discussion; we are facing a crisis skill shortage.

A study recently completed in Pennsylvania concludes that over the next ten years, thousands of advanced manufacturing industrial maintenance job openings will be created and that for every 40 of these job openings there will be only one (1) person advancing though our education system with the required skills. That is a 40 to 1 shortfall of skilled talent.

These jobs have tremendous leverage in the economy: a manufacturing job is said to support about 10 additional non-manufacturing jobs in the supply chain. From my experience in manufacturing, a good industrial maintenance person can enable 20, 40 or more manufacturing employees to be productive so that their jobs can continue to exist. These jobs have tremendous economic leverage.

A combination of the present demographics, the impact of mechatronics on the workplace, and the fact that we can't attract young people into education pathways that lead them to manufacturing means that we need to take another approach.

As we were told by a global VP of operations, "I don't know who my next maintenance people will be, all I know is that they already work for me." It is easier to take a person who wants to work in manufacturing and train him or her for the high skill jobs that need filled than it is to attract a person educated for high skill jobs and attract her or him to manufacturing. We don't have the luxury of time to solve the latter problem.

Therefore, we have focused on providing education and training for incumbent workers, while also providing programs in high school and community college for those few students who have already decided that they want to work with their minds and their hands in manufacturing.

In doing this, we believe that we have learned some lessons and have adopted some practices that work. I'd like to mention a baker's dozen plus two of these for your consideration in the event that there are some ideas here that might help you in Ontario.

By the way, from what I have seen over the last two days, you have done a better job than we have done in the states in addressing the education needs for mechatronics engineering at the Bachelor's level. In the states, our work has been more aimed at the level between high school and a 2 year associate degree for mechatronics engineering technologists.

1) This was already covered in detail by one of the earlier speakers. Start by asking the best of the best what they need. Listen to their needs and ask probing questions until you really understand what they are telling you.

2) Focus public and private efforts on meeting the needs of the top 1/3 of the world-class manufacturers in your region. The second 1/3 will eventually follow. The bottom 1/3, where public funds have typically been focused, are going to fail anyway, so don't exert any special effort on those needs.

3) Use the public education system to deliver industrial training. Force them to catch up, otherwise they will fall further and further behind and become totally irrelevant.

4) Provide a pathway to college academic credit for all workforce training programs. Don't make workers repeat training in a different classroom to obtain college credit.

5) Find a way to grant academic credit for skills already mastered. Don't expect workers to sit though class topics that they themselves could teach.

6) Provide training when and where it is needed. Accept the reality that maintenance people don't work regular hours and don't have a planned schedule. Deliver training on a flexible schedule, which may require computer-based or internet-based training. We work with schools that can enroll a new student in a new college class every Monday. Once enrolled, classes do not have fixed completion dates. Every student can progress at his or her own pace. Labs are open six days per week, morning, afternoon and evening to accommodate all shift schedules.

7) Articulate credits from institution to institution, from technical high schools, colleges, and universities. Allow students to be constantly moving from school to work to school. We have 2 plus 2 plus 2 programs that refer to 2 years in high school, 2 years in community college and 2 years in a university, with work interspersed in between, where students do not loose progress as they advance from one program to the next.

8) Don't pretend that your courses can be all things to all people. Base-level courses can work across multiple industries, but the more advanced the courses, the more they must be focused to target industries and sectors. Don't dumb down courses by choosing the lowest common denominators of need.

9) Make sure that classes include hands on experience on real industrial systems and equipment.

10) Teach troubleshooting as an art and a science of its own with real life practice. When many of the requirements you hear from industry are boiled down, they want people who can troubleshoot to solve problems.

11) Develop or identify meaningful industry credentials that provide intermediate achievement points along the way to a degree and which allow employers to gauge skills mastered across different institutions.

12) Recognize that these programs are expensive. Use industry training revenues and student tuition to cover costs. You won't cover the cost with tuition alone. Regular students can't afford industrial training rates. Even if workers and degree candidates sit in the same class, they needn't necessarily be paying the same rate.

13) Collaborate across institutions. You can't afford for every school to have these advanced programs. Put the academic competitiveness aside. Use funding to purchase equipment and pay for training, not for developing multiple versions of curriculum that already exists. So what if it wasn't invented here?

14) Recognize that the above requirements are disruptive to the faculty. This process will require more hours of work on the part of the faculty. Don't grant credit based upon the number of hours of contact time, but on the real and meaningful skills conveyed.

15) It is better for a group of schools to get advice from a single small group of executive visionaries than for each school to staff its own advisory council with a group of middle management reactionaries. This is what our Mid-Atlantic Mechatronics Advisory Council is about. We provide strategic guidance to a group of schools in the Mid-Atlantic region.

While all of this is going on with incumbent workers, we need to be working on ideas to get young students into the pipeline. That will take too long to solve the impending crisis, but we are always looking for new ideas as to how to accomplish this. Perhaps you can assist us with this dilemma.

There is much more that could be said about these 15 strategies, but we'll see if anyone wants to pursue any of that in the question period. Thank-you for inviting me and for your attention.

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Comments Keith, You are right on target in addressing the issues we face trying to staff our maintenance crew. I would have never thought that there would be such a shortage of people with enough mechanical and electrical background to consider for filling the many openings that exist. If I can find a person with just the basics in these areas then I am willing to invest the time and money it takes to qualify them to do the work we need done. I believe that the people who used to work with their hands doings mechanical things such as building models, maintain their bicycles, working with Dad on the family vehicles and engaging hobbies that sparked the interest and led to the enjoyment of creating things with the hands has fallen victim to the video game and the technologies associated with them. The many skills learned to create and maintain this activity has taken away from the mechanical skills everyone once picked up on their own. A shade tree mechanic is a thing of the past and a video gamer is what has taken its place. These skills are also very important in today's maintenance departments but they have to be rounded out with a good mechanical background, otherwise they won't fit in to the one person qualified to do it all maintenance crews expected in today's industries. Keith I am looking forward to future articles addressing these problems and how to go about correcting the shortfalls created by a blue collar work force. Jerrell, Posted by: Jerrell Conway on June 2, 2011 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):