Frequently, Quality Digest Daily has reported that many of our manufacturing readers say there is a lack of skilled talent to fill technical positions. For our audience, this has typically been in the area of metrology, which involves not only specialized knowledge but also a lot of experience, especially within the aerospace industry. Although there are exceptions, it’s hard to find “metrology” curriculum at your local college or junior college.
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In a broader sense within mainstream media, the skills problem has been referred to as the “skills gap.” Depending on your industry and where you live, “skills” can mean a lot of things. A highly skilled welder might have the skills for a company looking to fill a traditional welding position. However, if a company was looking to set up a robotic welding cell, that person might not have the skills at all, because although the company would want this person’s welding knowledge, it isn’t looking for a person to do the welding. It’s looking for a person with welding knowledge, robotics knowledge, and advanced-manufacturing skills. So whether there is a “skills gap” per se, depends on your perspective.
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Comments
Metrology training
My college - Corning Community College has a metrology course in our manufacturing, mechanical and machine tool technology programs. Our manual CMM was updated to PCDMIS and we have updated our optical comparitor. We also extensively cover the Y14.5-2009 ASME standard.
We graduate several students every year.
Feel free to contact me at longwell@corning-cc.edu if you have any employment opportunities.
John Longwell
Assiciat Professor
Corning Community College
Corning NY 14930
Business wants specific rather than general knowledge.
The problem that I see most, when retained to determine why throughput or quality is suffering and the direct cause is employee error, is that Management is looking for a specific replacement. It is not that they need a Metrologist, or Industrial Electrician (etc) it is that they are looking for Fred. Fred has been at the facility a long time. He probably does not have a degree and learned to set up and maintain the equipment on the shop floor while on the job. When equipment modifications occurred or equipment was updated, Fred helped to put it in and start it up. He probably went to vendor classes and then spent many hours working on the machines. He knows what machines have what quirks and how to get them back on-line quickly.
Now after a long and productive career, Fred is retiring - like many other experienced and talented Boomers. In most cases, he has been telling his Management that retirement is on the horizon and he needs to train a replacement. Management, pressured by the near term bottom line, has a real challenge going over compliment to allow Fred even 1 year of turnover to a qualified replacement, when in my experience the turn over period with complex equipment needs to be more like 3 years. When Fred hits the door, the crisis starts. This is the root cause of the problem.
To conclude, the problem IS NOT an absence of qualified applicants. It is the lack of Fred created by poor planning and decision making which benefits the bottom line in the near term rather than defending the asset for the long term . A tell tail sign of this condition is the over specified job posting. It is one of the first things I look for, in addition to assessing technician demographics and training programs.
The solution is for local business to establish pipelines with educational institutions and leverage internships, apprenticeships, develop specific coursework, and groom the potential employee population rather than search for a replacement in crisis mode.
Oh, and did I mention that because you are not Fred, we will only be offering half of his salary.
Best regards -
Metro-Mania
Since the first ISO 9001, metrology has been a main discussion topic between controllers and preventers; being myself a chemist, therefore acquainted with continuous processes, I don't see much value in spending a lot of money to collect and analyze samples every five minutes or so, when there's all evidence that the (production) process is stable. When a Unilever italian production plant was first ISO 9001 registered in 1995, the metrological expenditure was in the region of sixty thousand dollars, that was reduced to less than half six months later, when technicians became aware that so many measurements and calibrations were meaningless. In short, we must be more aware of what measurements mean and of their risks: all too often the budget for new measurment equipment far exceeds the required training budget. A scandalous example is found in hospital and the public health sector, where beautiful pieces of equipment lie in cellars, covered by dust.
Once more into the gap
Dirk-
You argue that skilled labor needs to be affordable, in order to compete with foreign competitors.
Companies making this argument suffer from a competetiveness gap, not a skills gap. A company should be able to pay its skilled workers market wages and be competetive. A company adding education intensive processes must be doing so to be competetive. This company is contemplating adding millions of dollars of equipment, building, infrastructure. It is doubtless taking on debt, or purchasing divisions, recruiting top management,etc. Paying the incremental cost for skilled labor is peanuts compared to these costs.
Companies bemoaning the skills gap need to look at all their costs (including management compensation) before they expect their employees to absorb the hit.
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