We want Skilled Workers but We Won’t Train Them. What Happened to Learning on the Job?

The biggest barrier to entering the trades today isn’t skill or interest. It is the unrealistic demand for experience that no one is willing to help build.

Ian Sandusky over at Practical Machinist posed a great question on Youtube, “What if you woke up one day, and half of your machining knowledge was suddenly gone?”

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a machine shop so I stepped into roles as I matured enough or in some cases got tall enough to operate a machine.  I never graduated to tool and die but I did have to disassemble and clean them and remember looking at all of the intricate parts thinking about how long it took to make each one.

But thinking back, we didn’t expect someone straight out of school to be a great machinist.  You put them on the less expensive projects.  You knew that they would grab that 5/16 drill when they needed to tap something 5/16-18, you knew that if you told them to make this shaft fit that 1.000” hole, they would turn it to exactly that size and wonder why it wouldn’t go it, they would go through tooling at an alarming rate, etc.  You expected to take a loss on them for a while and knew there was a risk that they would leave before you turned a profit on them but you did it anyway.  Companies aren’t willing to do that these days, my son is interested in becoming a machinist so I’ve been looking more at the job postings and similarly to automation, everyone is looking for 3 to 5 years of experience.

Also, education went through a rough patch when it came to most disciplines that support manufacturing.  Many of them didn’t invest in new equipment or completely closed their programs.  I just got back from Automate and they had an education summit there.  It was geared towards PLC programming, one of the panelists said that students could learn all they need today with simulation software.  While I have been tempted to borrow one of the Haas CNC trainers from the local school to catch up on modern CNCs, I don’t think these simulators can have the same impact compared to a student hearing that tool crash into that part or seeing the chips bunching up or feeling the machine vibrate where they are taking too heavy of a cut.

Companies need to start taking a chance on the inexperienced person again, donate material and tooling to schools to help cover the shortfalls in their ridiculously small operating budget, volunteer at their local schools to talk to the students about why they need to learn certain things to be successful, help the teachers understand what skills students need to have marketable job skills, etc.

Schools have to start seeing the trades as a successful career path.  I should have gone to a trade school.  In high school, I took advanced math because I loved solving equations and English in summer school because I was a poor reader.  My counselor never mentioned anything but 4 year universities and I wasn’t college material so I dropped out. While I don’t think they talk down about them like they did when I was in school, they certainly don’t celebrate someone signing up for the local trade school like they do someone who is getting ready to take on $100K of debt to get a 4 year degree.