21,420 to be exact. This is a 20% increase in the number of credentials issued in the United States from 2014. It is a great start toward the 100,000 skilled jobs that industry will need to fill over the next decade…
PMPA is an original founding partner of NIMS, and continues to support its mission to develop and certify industry recognized credentials for our workforce through consensus skill standards.
NIMS has developed skills standards ranging from entry-level to master-level that cover the breadth of metalworking operations and industrial technology maintenance. NIMS certifies individuals’ skills against these national standards via credentials that companies can use to recruit, hire, place, and promote individual workers. Schools and employer training programs incorporate the credentials as performance and completion measures to deliver high quality training to industry standards. NIMS will soon add credentials in Industrial Technology Maintenance and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) to its portfolio of offerings in 2016-2017.
NIMS works to ensure all individuals entering the workforce are equipped with the skills needed to be successful on the job from day one.
“Executives from PMPA member shops all tell us that they would hire people with skills -even if they did not have an immediate opening,” says Bernie Nagle, Executive Director of PMPA. “Our support of NIMS, and the RIGHT SKILLS NOW program is one way that PMPA and our members are addressing the issue of lack of skilled workforce. We congratulate NIMS, and their entire team, on the growth in credentials issued in 2015.”
PMPA congratulates NIMS, all of its partner and sponsoring organizations, and the professionals doing the work that made 2015 a record year for credentials issued. This record is evidence of both the commitment and achievement of developing a competitive workforce through our NIMS community.
For more information about NIMS : NIMS READY
For more information about Right Skills Now: Right Skills Now
For more information about a career in Precision Machining: Career Overview
Career fact sheet
Tag: Need for Skilled Workforce
I had the privilege of participating in the Business Leaders United Fly-In to Capital Hill in Washington D.C. earlier this week representing the Precision Machined Products Association.
In our Monday evening meeting we were joined by Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzger, and from the White House, Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy.
The fact that we got to meet with top staffers at various Senate and House offices, as well as staffers from the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) Committee convinced me that we had the attention of the folks who could make a difference in Washington, D.C..
I spoke with top staff assistants handling policy for Speaker Boehner and Senator Portman from my home state of Ohio.
We had substantive and frank discussions about the facts (on which we all seemed to agree) and possible solutions for this issue.
What worked – creating employer driven partnerships- even among competitors- summer youth programs, quantifying local area opportunities and job market research to make the career case- was shared and explored.
The challenges- lack of educational attainment, lack of ‘soft skills,’ and various funding issues were also discussed.
It is no longer about admitting that we have a lack of skilled workers in the ‘unemployed workforce.’
There was no evidence of denial of the problem of unemployment and lack of skills.
What all of our contacts asked about was centered around three key questions:
- What works to help us qualify and put to work long term unemployed in middle skill jobs?
- How do we build the ROI case for this?
- How do we scale it nationwide?
My fellow small business delegates from BLU shared some of their challenges, but more importantly, their success stories of their local partnerships.
What Washington wants/needs to know is how can we build these up to gain national traction?
What would you suggest?
Guest post by Peter Morici.
Jobs Growth Tanks in March
Peter Morici
Twitter @pmorici1
The Labor Department announced the economy only created 88,000 jobs in March as many more adults quit looking for work than found jobs-for many Americans, good job remain tough to find.
The headline unemployment rate is 7.6 percent, but adding in adults who are discouraged and quit looking for work and part-timers, preferring full-time positions, the jobless rate becomes 13.8 percent. And, for many years, inflation-adjusted wages have been falling and income inequality rising.
Sluggish growth is one culprit-the Bush expansion delivered only 2.1 percent annual GDP growth-that’s about the same as the Obama recovery after 42 months. However, globalization and technological progress have wrought fundamental changes that rapid growth alone can’t fix.
Cheaper natural gas and rising wages in China make the United States more attractive for manufacturing. However, new factories require very few workers-engineers have applied the wizardry of handheld devices to factory automation with amazing results.
Similar progress has reduced many business support positions ranging from secretaries to travel agents. All, slicing demand for workers with a general high-school education.
Over the last decade, the same thing has happened to college graduates occupying middle management and similar professional positions. Consequently, college graduates have been taking jobs once predominantly filled by high school graduates-insurance agents and adjusters, retail managers, to name a few-and the earnings advantage of college graduates over less educated workers has narrowed.
Well paying jobs abound for college graduates in technical areas-accounting, engineering, nursing and the like-but not for those with degrees in liberal arts and general business. Similarly, high school graduates with some additional training, often through a community college, can find good jobs, for example, in the energy, medical, and hospitality sectors.
All this gives rise to widening income inequality between those who have specialized skills and those who don’t, and it imposes particular burdens on the two bookends of the labor force-recent grads and workers above 50.
Recent liberal arts graduates face particular difficulty getting that first decent job-such as in finance or the media-where employer training and entry-level experience combine to impart job-specific skills that permit them to climb the ladder.
Displaced older workers face much longer periods of unemployment, and many never secure positions that pay as well as the jobs lost. Many are digging into retirement savings well before they are 65, creating an army of near-indigent elderly a decade or two from now.
To combat unemployment, the Federal Reserve has kept mortgage interest rates low, but this penalizes the elderly who rely on CDs and fixed-income investments. They are returning to work, often taking jobs and displacing younger workers.
Stronger growth would help and is possible. Forty-two months into the Reagan recovery, GDP was advancing at a 5.2 percent annual pace-that would bring unemployment down to five percent pretty quickly.
More rapid growth requires importing less and exporting more-dealing with the $500 billion trade deficit on oil, by drilling more offshore and in Alaska, and with China, by addressing its undervalued currency and protectionism.
Faster growth also requires right sizing business regulations to make investing in new jobs less expensive and time consuming. Regulatory enforcement is needed to protect the environment, consumers and financial stability but must be delivered cost effectively and quickly to add genuine value.
However, unless America wants to sell what it makes cheaply, like so many Asian economies, it must have a smarter, savvier, and better trained workforce.
Parents don’t want their offspring on the vocational track. Hence, high schools have become, overwhelmingly, college preparatory institutions, when it is possible to prepare many graduates to directly enter the labor force in technical areas.
College students don’t want the hard slog through nursing or engineering. Art history and economics are easier and less intruding on the social aspect of college. And universities are too much run by professors who prefer to contemplate the shortcomings of their civilization than train young people to build it.
In a nutshell, more and better jobs require pro-growth trade, energy and regulatory policies, and more realistic expectations among parents, students and the high schools and universities that train workers.
Peter Morici is an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business,, University of Maryland, and widely published columnist.