I am so tired of hearing the lament of people in the machining business that they can’t hire any good machinists. I am going to throw out some ideas that might be useful. Feel free to debunk them in the comments.
Young men are the most underemployed group of folks in America.
Millions of men in the United States are under 35, live at home, are unemployed or have low paying jobs. They are often unmarried or not in a long-term relationship. They are prone to depression and drug use.
The American education system continues to do an atrocious job of developing and motivating men who see no future in factory work. Machining work, if it is taught at all, is considered a dead end, yesterday’s kind of work, by most young men and women.
On the other side of the fence are smaller companies, mostly owned by older men, who view young men with doubt and suspicion as future productive employees.
The owners see high precision production as difficult to accomplish without expensive new CNC machines. They view the high-tech machines as producing new jobs, which their old employees do not relish
In Noah’s recent podcast with Richard Kingsbury, the distributor for INDEX CNC machines in the UK, Richard pointedly said he sells INDEX multis because companies cannot find employees for mechanical machines. He is right that INDEXs will crush the productivity of single spindle CNC machines, though at a huge initial cost.
If I put all of these assertions together, I see a problem begging for an attainable solution.
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Some ideas to consider.
Create a machining coach, either in the organization or hire one from the outside.
How do you do this? Offer money and status. The profession of “coach” is becoming increasingly popular in America. It may be a life coach, a math coach, or a homebuilding coach, but people are searching for folks who can make them better at what they do and are willing to pay for it.
What if a screw machine shop hired a private coach for $50,000 to train a few sharp students for six months–say on a $40,000 Davenport or Acme screw machine. The participants would be promised generous wages if they excelled. In the coaching sessions they would only focus on setting up and operating the machines every day. They would not have to worry about other things going on in the shop that would distract them from intense training.
Many companies could afford it if they spent a fraction of their budget they would use to invest in a $2 million CNC Multi-Spindle, or five $200,000 Swiss machines,
Offering coaching could help them attract some of the men living in basements or sleeping in bunk beds as they return home from dead-end jobs at McDonald’s or Amazon.
You could find interested candidates through word of mouth or advertising online. Many people know somebody already making a good living in machining or other forms of manufacturing.
The attraction will be money and the possibility of good training from coaches who can speak their language. It is up to the bosses to find the coaches or train people in their organization who have never considered the upside of being a coach.
American manufacturing and machining has a chance to rebuild this decade. It will take creativity, effort, and money to make it happen. The potential employees are out there now. They need to see the opportunities to take advantage of them.
Question: What experiences have you had with coaches?
2 Comments
Coaches have been a mixed bag in my life. Early on (Little League Baseball, Pee-wee Football) I was lucky. I had a coach who had been a talented player in those sports, had an understanding of those sport’s mechanics, and probably most importantly, a knack (and the patience) for teaching those sports to young people. My Dad. As I moved on to high school football, I got to see what a gift it was to have a coach like him (I tried baseball, but I didn’t have the skills – and in my mind, it’s really a more difficult game to excel at than football).
At 5’8″ and 140 lb. I was not one of the big guys on the field. However, I could block or tackle anyone (these are the two most basic skills to learn in football). That didn’t matter much in my high school though (if you weren’t 6′ and 200 lb or more, you didn’t get much of a look). My experience of the coaches there was that they were really more like managers. I can’t recall them ever actually teaching anyone the skills used in the game. It seemed like they expected the players to come to play already knowing how to do things.
Let me offer a different perspective. My perspective is based on actual experience. I have invested in and and sit on a board of a company that specializes in matching talent to opportunities and opportunities to talent. Here is what I have discovered.
Until very recently, there has never been a way to connect the right person to the right job and vice versa. There has never been a system that defines the specificity of the job and match that to the specificity of the candidate. We provide that. (This is not a commercial, I am responding to the issue at hand)
When a person is matched to a job that they are suited for based on likes, desires and experience, they become much more likely to enjoy what they are doing and stick to the job. The benefits of this are tremendous. Onboarding, training and waste costs plummet while productivity and reliability skyrocket. We work with major OEMs and Tier suppliers connecting their job requirements to the right talent.
We are not a talent acquisition firm, what we do is match likes, desires and experience to the specific jobs that match the specificity of the job requirements. We currently specialize in manufacturing as it falls into one of the easiest job types to fill with the highest success rates. This takes about 10 minutes to accomplish.
Here is real data from our process. We have been able to save major manufacturing corporations over $5 million per year per 1,500 person plant in hiring practices alone, without RIFs, plant closures or asset sales.
We fill these jobs in a hand full of days, not the typical 45-65 days that typical recruiting and staffing firms take. We reduce the turnover rate from the typical 55/65% to <2% and these employees that stay for over 120 days forming reliable and stable workforces.
We are so confident in our deliverables, we are happy to be compensated on a gain-share where we earn our money on a percentage of the savings we deliver.
So while this is not a commercial, the point that I am trying to make is that if due care is exerted in determining the specificity of the job, and that is matched to the specificity of the candidates, there are many candidates available and willing to work and be productive in the manufacturing space. All it takes is a systematic approach to finding those people. Think about it like this. Every aspect of the manufacturing process has been tweaked and systematized to determine scheduling of supply chain purchasing of materials, equipment and maintenance, but not in the supply chain of the workforce. Apply that mentality to the workforce, then predictive hiring becomes a reality as we have delivered to international manufacturing concerns delivering significant competitive advantages.