Omni Manufacturing provides tour to local Tri Star students
Students from Tri Star’s Precision Machining Program got to take a tour of Omni Manufacturing in St. Marys on Friday. Students from the Junior and Senior classes got to see how the skills they’re learning might translate into real-world careers.
“This gets them out into the shops and lets them see how things kind of flow day to day in the real world versus the educational environment,” said Precision Machining Instructor
Mitch Knous.
The tour started at Omni’s Tool Room where tool and die makers work, and an area where the Omni is looking for help.
“Skilled tool and die makers are few and far between,” said Process Engineer Jim Freewalt. Freewalt explained that tool and die makers are important in their operations because they allow them to handle repairs and fabrication on-site.
“When you don’t have that, and the press needs to be fixed, when you don’t have that skill set, it hurts,” said Freewalt.
As the tour progressed, students got to see every facet of
Omni’s business from powder coating, to robotic welding, and from stamping to finished products ready to be shipped.
“It means everything for them to actually be at that age where they’re just ready to move into a job, and they actually have the skills they have. When they have the basics, which is all you really need, they’re trainable,” said Freewalt.
“Hopefully they see some of the possibilities that are local. They don’t have to move out of the area to use the skills they’ve picked up at Tri Star,” said Knous. Freewalt said that the difference is stark when working with someone with even basic skills versus someone who is just starting to learn.
“To come in completely green, that’s a lot of work, but to have that skill set and know how to run the basic machine, and some of the CNC machines, it’s night and day when you get to work with someone young who knows that already,” said Freewalt.
Freewalt said that in his corner of the machining world, there is always work to be done.
“You can work six or seven days a week, and we have more work than they could ever get done,” said Freewalt. At Omni, Freewalt said that he tries to show young people that there is a lot more than a single job in the industry.
“It’s not just a single job, you don’t just do the same thing, this is actually a very skilled trade,” said Freewalt. In the United States, Freewalt said that the skilled trades are everything and the backbone of the country.
“It’s just having stuff that we can offer them that they could actually make a career of and work until retirement. It’s a sense of pride that you have it for them,” said Freewalt.