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In an age when every hire counts, how can you tell whether a job applicant really has the skills to do the job? When it comes to metalworking, what can anyone tell from an interview?
Like many businesses struggling with the shortage of qualified workers, Fred Latour had similar questions and concerns. The lawnmower was his partner's idea.
"You can put a whole lot on the resume," says Latour, president and CEO of Sheet Metal Components, Inc., of Atlanta. "But it doesn't prove anything."
So Latour's former partner brought a lawnmower to work and cut some people down to size with it. The applicant would be asked: "Can you take a lawnmower apart and put it back together and make sure it works," says Latour. "That was the idea."
Latour's company noticed that the unusual method proved which unskilled candidates had the mechanical aptitude for the varied jobs at Sheet Metal Components (www.sheetmetalcomponents.com), which performs laser and turret work, press brake work, welding, stamping, and rolling, along with machining work. These days turnover at his job shop isn't what it used to be, but the lawnmower is still available for use on prospective job candidates.
Given the growing shortage of skilled labor, companies around the country are looking for innovative ways to attract and retain skilled workers. Company executives are also getting creative in their efforts to generate interest in the metalworking fields at a time when educators have seemingly abandoned the industry.
If a lawnmower isn't in your H.R. department's future, what can industry leaders do now to stop the decline of skilled workers? The answer might be to start getting creative now, because if you think the government is going to solve the labor crunch, you might consider this exchange:
A few years back, Phil Pratt was doing some lobbying on behalf of the metalworking trades in Washington, D.C., and attended a conference with an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat. The aide relayed a conversation with Kennedy on the subject. "She said Kennedy wanted to know if there really was a shortage of welders in the United States," Pratt says.
"That's the scary part," says Pratt, the president of Asheville, N.C.-based SilverHawk Associates, a consulting firm specializing in hiring and retaining people in manufacturing. "It reflects the fact that the elected officials have no idea about this shortage."
Pratt says industries should forget about getting help from the government, where the tide of training money has shifted out toward technology training and away from the more traditional trades.
He proposes a major shift toward grass-roots efforts to train and retain local workers through regional training programs. Those small-ball efforts can include going to the local training facilities, community colleges, even high schools, to attempt to open partnerships with students and educators.
In the late 1980s lots of companies got rid of their apprenticeship programs at a time when a new world of technology was just emerging. Educators began shifting their focus to computer-related industries. "Since then, lots of fizzle has gone out of the industry," says Pratt, the former president of the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology, of Troy, Ohio. "There are a lot of other industries that are more exciting to young people. It may be based on a misconception that manufacturing is [exclusively] hard and dirty work. But it's developed into a real finesse sector. "The government is still willing to fund the tech trades, but that has taken the training and promotion money away from traditional tradesmen and sent it off to these other areas," Pratt continues. "Part of the problem is that we've not made these trades attractive to young people. Moms and dads are also discouraging their kids from entering these trades."
Jerry Benish, director of human resources for Camcraft, Inc., agrees. "Guidance counselors are judged on how many kids they send to college rather than what is best for the kid," says Benish, whose firm is a manufacturer of precision component parts. "Some of these kids go to college and some of them drop out and don't get the career they could have gotten."
Like most companies, Camcraft (www.camcraft.com) is finding that it's difficult to get skilled workers when those skills are by and large not valued by the modern education system. Many schools are simply not teaching machining skills any more, meaning that option doesn't seem to be available any longer to young people about to choose their career paths.
Camcraft runs a dozen or so tours of its facilities each year for local high school kids, an attempt to expose young people to the kinds of careers that are available in manufacturing. In one case recently, the company brought in a class of eighth graders. "To many people a factory is four brick walls, and they never get to see what's inside," he says. The long-term hope is that the effort will produce workers down the road as well as valuable knowledge to the students who participate.
Pratt feels that the industry itself must work with schools and young people directly if it has a chance to fill its future needs for workers. And "if there was one essential thing we should do it's to develop, train and escalate the skills of our existing work force."
He is a big fan of SkillsUSA (www.skillsusa.org), an industry advocate group based in Leesburg, Va. The non-profit organization works with 280,000 students and instructors each year in 13,000 schools in the United States, providing a wide range of technical training programs for students. SkillsUSA also conducts an annual conference where the best students get to show off their work.
"They're doing something positive ... to encourage young people in ways that they hadn't thought of," says Pratt. "And lots of people don't know that this kind of program exists."
By now, most industry leaders realize that the price tag for doing nothing could be astronomical.
Already, contracts are being lost because some companies haven't got the skilled workers to deliver specific products or work on time, Pratt says. Some companies are ramping up their training efforts, reaching out to not only young workers but older ones who may have left the field and want to return until retirement.
The shortage of skilled laborers means the ability to assess a prospective employee's ability to learn is more important than ever, says Julie Maydew, vice president of ResourceMFG (www.resourcemfg.com), a Deer Park, Texas, manufacturing recruitment company.
"Being able to assess aptitude is a key way to see if they can fit into your organization," Maydew says. "Some companies will have to customize their hiring practices. Some should develop pre-employment assessments of abilities, then train those with knowledge gaps who have the ability to learn."
When it isn't courting young people, Benish says his company found a more permanent solution to the labor shortage by looking to a "temporary" fix.
Using three different temp organizations around the Hanover Park, Ill., area, Camcraft has found a steady stream of workers for the company's entry-level positions and then entices those temps with the prospect of permanent jobs with a real future.
Like many companies, Camcraft was spending lots of money a few years back on recruiting and training new workers, only to find that many recruits were gone within a month or so. That's when the company began experimenting, and the carrot it held out was company-paid training for those with the aptitude for metalworking, Benish says.
After showing they had the ability and desire to do the work, temporary workers were hired on full time and placed in a variety of training programs.
"We have our own internal trainer and he teaches all the basic courses to bring them up to basic ability," says Benish. "We pay for the course, and the students get to take them on company time." The worker-students can even gain college credit in the process, because Camcraft works directly with their local college, the College of DuPage, in nearby Glen Ellyn, Ill. The company employs about 210 regular workers, and maintains between 20 and 40 temps at any given time.
Camcraft also runs several apprentice programs in conjunction with several national trade organizations. The program is intended to make workers feel better about the skills they have and the profession they've chosen.
The certifications, says Benish "mean we can show people what they need to know and that a third party is doing the certification testing, it tells [workers] that it's a national organization that is testing them.
"These aren't just jobs; these are careers that you can go anywhere in the USA with and show another company that you know what you know," he says. "The person feels better about their work."
And the need for skilled workers is universal around the country. Maydew says every state has a need for welders, for example, and that by 2010 there will be a shortage of 250,000 welders in the United States, according to the American Welding Society.
"As a country, we need to develop training programs to work with the manufacturing sector to train the skilled work force of tomorrow," Pratt says.
The shortage of qualified "operators, technicians, and engineers in the field of welding is a potential threat to some U.S. industries," according to an American Welding Society study released in 2002. The society reported that more than 40 percent of the heavy industrial manufacturing firms reported either a moderate or extensive impact on their productivity because of the shortage of qualified welders. About 30 percent of the firms in the automotive and construction industrial sectors indicated similar impacts.
Another one of its major findings was that nearly half of the firms interviewed reported that their welding-related training needs "are not being adequately met. Many companies report difficulties locating qualified individuals with welding expertise, from apprentice welders to engineers. The nature of the work and lack of advanced welding education programs are most commonly cited as the reasons for his problem," the report states.
Benish says companies need to remember one vital aspect when hiring workers and then trying to keep them on board: "You've got to be willing to invest in people," he says.
Latour would agree. He doesn't merely rely on the lawnmower litmus test to keep qualified workers. He believes in other programs that can make workers feel more at home and secure in their job.
Latour says his firm, which employs 50-plus workers, has minimized turnover in recent years by instituting a profit-sharing plan. Backed by company donations, employees are vested in the company after three years and can collect on the money when they retire at age 62, Latour says.
The system, which has been in place for years at Sheet Metal Components, has served to keep skilled workers on the job longer. "We were getting plenty of applicants for our jobs, but nobody had metalworking experience," Latour says. "If they do have experience, you grab them because they're worth an awful lot to a company," he says.
It's not as if the government couldn't help if it wanted to. When the shortage of skilled nurses became an issue in the last decade, the government got into the problem in a big way, stepping in with money for training programs and other incentives. The reason: Health care is a political hot-button issue that gets the public's attention, Pratt says. Until the problem is recognized as a major threat to the economy, the government is unlikely to act, he says.
Until then, Pratt says the labor shortage isn't going to go away, and a massive effort on the part of the industry is needed if change is to occur. "There has to be a grass-roots effort to alert the public and bring together businesses, chambers of commerce and the education fields," Pratt says. "If we're relying on the American government to fund it, it's not going to happen. They've lost touch."
Editor's Note: Joe Dowd is a freelance writer based in Kingston, N.Y.
author: By Joe Dowd