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Skilled labor crisis, or a crisis of character?

Any event that brings manufacturers and educators together is a good thing, and one that brings guidance counselors and principals onto the shop floor—like this one in Souix Falls, S.D.—is even better.

“A four-year (degree) is important, but it's not the only way to achieve success and have job fulfillment,” he said. That’s what Paul Sova, president of Showplace Wood Products, told the Argus-Leader—but I wish the statement had come from guidance counselors, or anyone in education for that matter. His point: Years of post-secondary education doesn’t necessarily make a person a highly engaged, curious, productive employee.

The statement is a nuanced one, and it goes against a lot of what we hear in popular media: that manufacturing needs highly educated individuals to operate highly technical machines. Well, is this really true? Last time I checked, many modern machines in metal fabrication are becoming easier to use. Some new press brakes show operators exactly what tools need to go where, and bring them through a bend sequence step by step, complete with a 3-D animation.

The worker shortage is multifaceted, and one contributor of course is the demise of vocational programs in secondary education. And sure, our culture doesn’t value hands-on work, and teenagers can’t dig in and fix their own cars.

But there may be another cause. Extremely low-skilled jobs—place-this-bolt-in-this-hole-hour-after-hour kind of jobs—used to be there for people who may not have grown up in the kindest of environments. At low-product-mix OEMs, these jobs have become automated. At high-product-mix environments (which represents most U.S. manufacturers), the people who work the assembly lines or handle material may still perform a job that’s labeled as “low skill” in the traditional sense. But in reality, they need to think on their feet, participate in kaizen events, and be engaged. It’s not like the days before global competition.

With plenty of low-skilled jobs, a person could graduate high school and get a job at the local factory. If that person had a drug problem or any other personal issue that hindered basic job performance (like, say, showing up to work sober), he’d lose his job and bounce to another one.

If that person focused and applied himself, he could rise through the ranks to become a machine technician, joining others who may have enjoyed quality vocational education at their high school and two-year technical college. (This kind of quality education is a rarity today, of course, which contributes to the problem.)

Today global competition and automation have severely limited the number of low-skilled jobs, and they’re not coming back. Unfortunately, people still fall through societal cracks. They used to be able to find a job putting a bolt in a hole all day. They weren’t successful. They struggled. They may have bounced around from job to job after long spans of unemployment.

Now entry-level fabricators come home after pushing buttons on a powerful CNC machine. New hires are making parts within a few weeks. But just because he’s pushing buttons and making parts doesn’t make him engaged. At first, his supervisor programs the machine and tells him what parts to make and when. But eventually he’s expected to become engaged in improvement events and perhaps even learn to program, set up, and maintain his own machine.

The people with the right background leap at this opportunity. But the ones who fell through the cracks still struggle. In some respects, the skilled labor crisis isn’t about skill. It’s about lack of engagement, and a lot of this comes from a much larger problem rooted in societal issues. We call them “personal problems,” but a lot of that can come from societal ones: unsupportive family life, poverty, and so on.

Ultimately, it may be less about the skills you know and more about the character you have.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Tim Heston

Senior Editor

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-381-1314

Tim Heston, The Fabricator's senior editor, has covered the metal fabrication industry since 1998, starting his career at the American Welding Society's Welding Journal. Since then he has covered the full range of metal fabrication processes, from stamping, bending, and cutting to grinding and polishing. He joined The Fabricator's staff in October 2007.