Matthew Philips from Bloomberg Businessweek wrote, “There is no skills gap.” James Bessen, in the Harvard Business Review, heartily disagrees in his article, “Employers Aren’t Just Whining—the ‘Skills Gap’ Is Real.” And in his January 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama declared the need to “train Americans with the skills employers need, and match them to good jobs that need to be filled right now.” The administration’s $2 billion punctuation mark—in the form of an Apprenticeship Training Fund—highlights a very real perception problem.
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No matter the method of analysis or the terminology applied to the issue, one thing is certain: As the Manpower Group Talent Shortage Survey 2014 reveals, “Despite the continuing caution exercised by many companies amid ongoing economic uncertainty, a substantial portion of employers in the U.S. and worldwide identify a lack of available skilled talent as a continuing drag on business performance.”
Albert Einstein put it this way: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” In other words, to the man or woman on the short end of a job search, the perception of the reluctant employer is a crucial reality for them!
Manpower’s survey reports that the top three jobs employers are having difficulty filling are:
1. Skilled trade workers
2. Engineers
3. Technicians
That finding is not a surprise to Shon Isenhour or Michael Aroney, who have been creating solutions for the manufacturing sector for the past 15 years. Isenhour and Aroney are reliability and maintenance consultants. Equipment reliability is a huge factor in whether a manufacturing company is profitable—and reliability and maintenance professionals fall squarely into the engineer and technician groups identified by the survey as difficult to fill.
Isenhour and Aroney share some of their wisdom on the problem and solution:
Quality Digest Daily: So is there really a skills gap or not?
Allied Reliability Group |
Michael Aroney: In this arena, yes. It’s very difficult to find someone with the specific reliability and maintenance skills they need out there because a qualified engineer or technician will get hired immediately; they don’t spend too much time on the streets. The critical gap is in the precision maintenance.
Eruditio LLC |
Shon Isenhour: A lot of the baby boomers filling those positions are finally starting to retire. The downturn of the economy postponed that, but now that the economy is coming back and some of the 401Ks are in better shape, lots of guys are exiting that industry pretty quickly. Unfortunately, they’re taking a lot of great knowledge with them. It is definitely changing the dynamics of the workforce.
QDD: Why are reliability and maintenance professionals so critical?
Aroney: Simply put, if your equipment isn’t producing, you’re losing money. An effective reliability program not only saves money, but it also increases capacity due to more assets being online at any given time. The best analogy I can use is to think of maybe laser alignments, where one employee uses precision tools and another might use duct tape. Obviously, a lot of problems can be introduced. What our clients find is that the knowledge of a reliability and maintenance professional is lacking in their organizations, and they’re typically about two years behind in their ability to get the needed skill sets to qualify as a certified reliability and maintenance professional.
QDD: Why do you think so few young people go into those fields?
Isenhour: One of the baby-boomer legacies is that, to “be more successful than the old man,” you have to go to college.
Aroney: Well, part of our culture for decades has been that everyone has to go to college to get a good-paying job. Everyone wants to be a knowledge worker.
QDD: Does becoming a certified reliability and maintenance tech or engineer really make sense for newcomers to the workforce?
Isenhour: What we find is that, in reality, if you go back to working in these skilled trades, you’re able to generate and make more money than the average college student coming out with a four-year degree. Not only that, but you don’t have all of the debt associated with a four-year degree.
Aroney: Now the opportunity for a revitalized middle class is going back full circle to getting your hands dirty because these positions pay very well, and there’s some 600,000 positions open right now in North America.
QDD: What about company apprenticeships?
Isenhour: Company apprenticeship programs fell by the wayside, and first-generation tech schools began to take their place. Too many people thought the solution was to send an employee to a class in some sunny locale, and he would learn about something for a week or so and then supposedly come back to the facility and make a big difference in the way the business would run. That’s really just industrial tourism. One of the key pieces of those bygone apprenticeship programs was having a coach or a mentor to help people through that process. Unfortunately, the rapid loss of key personnel in the industry also means the loss of experienced mentors.
QDD: What are some options for companies experiencing the skills gap in this industry?
Isenhour: Our consulting clients understand the value of growing these skills organically from within their existing personnel, so Eruditio came up with a model very similar to an apprenticeship program where it’s hands-on in the plant. It’s a blended learning curriculum that involves an applied learning process that’s all about getting employees or students introduced to a learning objective, having them apply it in their company, and then having a qualified, seasoned coach/mentor working them through to project completion. That process then has a quick return on investment (ROI) and can help change the culture of the facility.
Aroney: Of course, some clients just don’t have anyone to train, and that’s where Allied’s targeted talent acquisition comes in. One of the ways we’ve been able to fill these gaps is with guys who are transitioning out of the military. They’ve learned how to troubleshoot, they’re mission-focused, they have leadership skills, and they know how to fix things properly and keep equipment up and running. Another need in the market is stop-gap personnel while Allied goes out and tries to recruit a permanent person able to bring those skills to the site and provide stability. That’s a real challenge, so we typically bring in one of our own consultants who will operate as on-site staff augmentation while the employee seen as their future comes up to speed.
QDD: Is corporate perception of a transient workforce an issue?
Isenhour: Well, it seems a cliché, but would you rather have someone who hasn't been trained work for you for years, or someone who has been trained work for you for a shorter period? In other words, who will you get the most results from? But yes, that’s why we are so focused on getting a return on investment as an employee is going through the program. Then our typical students are showing a tenfold ROI. In fact, one of our recent students presented a training project, and just one module of that project saved the company $250,000 in the first year.
QDD: What certifications are associated with this industry?
Isenhour: The Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) has two certifications. There is the Certified Maintenance Reliability Professional (CMRP), which is your engineers, managers, and supervisors, and then there is the Certified Maintenance Reliability Technician (CMRT), which is a newer certification for your technicians, craftsmen, and folks who are actually repairing the manufacturing assets.
QDD: What do those certs really mean to employers and employees?
Aroney: When somebody has a CMRP or CMRT certification, you can assume a certain body of knowledge, and when you combine that with their work experience, you pretty much know what you’re getting. We find that candidates who do affiliate with the SMRP have a higher likelihood of getting placements with our clients. More companies are realizing that their assets are holding them back, so they are getting very involved with SMRP, and list those certifications as required or “nice to have” for job candidates.
Isenhour: The CMRP is especially valuable for employees to increase their mobility within the field. The CMRT is used in two ways. One way is for a company—like an airline company—to communicate its dedication to top-shelf maintenance by requiring all its techs to be CMRT-certified, and then they can also use the cert as an internal measuring stick to ensure that their training programs have been effective.
Conclusion
Isenhour: What we really do is look at the individual needs of our clients. Sometimes Allied has the best solution, sometimes Eruditio is a better fit. We're able to flex back and forth. The idea is that as long as a company contacts one or the other of us, we can get them connected to the right folks to provide the solution that works best for them.
Aroney: Between us, we can cover everything from job-task analysis, to talent acquisition, to testing the craftsman or engineer, to developing the necessary skills and applying them.
Comments
The Systems' Cinderellas
Maintenance and Logistics are the most common ones and unfortunately they aren't alone. Gaps mean comparing a given system against other(s), which I personally don't find correct, unless the context(s) in which systems operate are taken into consideration. On one hand; on another hand, companies and organizations have never invested much money to improve the cultural skills of their personnel, thus making the paradigm of creating solutions for evolving realities quite unrealistic. At a personal level, we've created a team to study a different approach to the decades old problem of reliable systems registration: the idea seems to work but companies and organizations (or should I say "people"?) are afraid of the news. Which takes us back to cultural contexts and skills.
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