Just can’t get the staff

I recently attended a US Whitehouse-led conference to advance manufacturing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

During the day a series of corporate and government representative spoke about the challenges to advancing manufacturing performance. A panelist from the aerospace industry said his company builds basketball sized satellites. However, he said that as they prepare for launch, a critical piece of equipment often fails, and they have difficulty finding people to fix it.

“Where are the maintenance fixers of tomorrow?” he asked the audience.

That question caused a debate on the challenges of finding welders, CNC technicians, and other types of skilled technicians.

The facilitator asked: “Does anyone know how to build large pipelines of skilled maintenance pros? Where do we find them? How do we build them?

When no one else responded, I proceeded to share not just how to identify talent, but how to build a societal culture that supports these careers.

My belief is that we can’t just focus on internships for our youth, we need to focus on re-turnships, to retrain displaced talent and upgrade them to tackle new challenges. We need to take ex-offenders and give them new pathways to prosperity.

What we glorify, we get. So until more of our mainstream media start to glorify the skilled worker, and inform parents that the world of manufacturing is not what it was, we will continue to have anaemic growth.

Contact Joel at Joel@ skilltv.net