The Invisible Hand Is NOT Training Enough Skilled Machinists.
(And by the way, neither are we.)
Estimates of as many as 600,000 unfilled skilled manufacturing jobs despite years of unemployment over 8% just don’t compute. As a free market guy, I continue to be frustrated waiting for Adam Smith’s Invisble Hand to bring the trained workers our industry needs.
Why isn’t the Invisible Hand working?
- Has it been handcuffed by school bureaucrats who insist that college is for everyone?
- And parents who fail to critically think about the ROI and Debt obligations that a college degree means today?
- Has the invisible hand been amputated by school board and advisory council members who think that the trades is just a necessary evil for someone else’s troublemaker of a kid?
- Do we have a need for public private partnerships like Right Skills Now to elevate the need for skilled tradesmen and to show advanced manufacturing as a viable, well paying career? Why is the US only in the 17th in Science or 25th in Math achievement worldwide?
- Or have we as shop owners and machinists been missing in guiding that invisible hand by concentrating on everything else except skilled workforce development?
What are you doing to develop the skilled workforce that you need?
Invisible Hand Graphic courtesy Micro Loan Bank Kiva
A Few Good Workers originally published in Modern Applications News May 1999.
don fitchett - Industrial Training says:
It’s part of a larger problem, the smaller the company, the more short term focused they are. While at the same time some of the larger companies decided to pocket the profits instead of traditional training and reinvesting in the workforce. The short term focus caught up with us, now there is a scramble to promote non-college and community college technical job training. A sudden urgency to promote manufacturing in our k-12 schools and to get manufacturers to work with community colleges to develop job specific training. Here is some support material. The more who see it the sooner we get back on the right track. http://pinterest.com/plctech/stem-education/
and http://pinterest.com/plctech/industry-analysis-and-statistics/
and http://pinterest.com/plctech/sos-save-our-skills/