60 Min says US manufacturing needs us!

FIRST General Forum
1

There was a story on 60 min that explained how what we are doing in FIRST is good for the country. It did not mention FIRST, but what we are doing in FIRST is right on par with what they want.

The balance of power in Washington didn’t change this week as President Obama and most members of Congress kept their jobs. They’ll go back to work and face an unemployment problem that also hasn’t changed very much. Every month since January 2009, more than 20 million Americans have been either out of work or underemployed. Yet despite that staggering number, there are more than three million job openings in the U.S. Just in manufacturing, there are as many as 500,000 jobs that aren’t being filled because employers say they can’t find qualified workers.

It’s called “the skills gap.” How could that be, we wondered, at a time like this with so many people out of work? No place is the question more pressing than in Nevada. The state with the highest unemployment rate in the country. A place where there are jobs waiting to be filled.

Karl Hutter: Yeah, we hear way too much about the United States manufacturing, we don’t manufacture anything anymore. Not true. Not true.

Byron Pitts: Sure, it’s Mexico, it’s in China–

Karl Hutter: Yeah, yeah, that all went to China, that all went to Mexico. Not true, whatsoever.

Karl Hutter is the new chief operating officer of Click Bond in Carson City, Nev., a company his parents started in 1969.

Karl Hutter: We’re still technically a small business, but we’re growing quickly.

Byron Pitts: So, you’re hiring?

Karl Hutter: We are hiring. We’re hiring and we need to find good people. And that’s really what the challenge is these days.

2

This is a big deal in the community college world. The school that I work at recently was awarded $12.9 million from the US Dept of Labor to spread its Advanced Manufacturing Program to other community colleges across the state. You can find details in the article here. It’s a huge deal and schools around the country are looking to help create the kind of skilled workers that can fill these jobs.
Several area manufacturing plants are paying for their workers to attend school and get the degree to become more skilled in the workplace. If your local community college doesn’t offer the program I would ask them why, it is heavily grant funded and a great opportunity to boost enrollment.

3

I’ve seen this problem first hand the last 2 years in my first job out of college. We’ve had an electrician opening posted for 2 months with only 1 applicant in that time span and are facing a wave of retirements in the next few years that will almost cut our skilled trades staff in half.

There’s a catch 22 here in that many of these jobs want someone with experience and are unwilling to hire someone fresh out of school for fear of the unknown, which makes it difficult to get hired out of school. I hope FIRSTers will apply for these types of jobs, and remember to flaunt their FIRST experience as much as they can. It’s a good way to show experience without holding many internships or a past job. For me it was the difference maker that got me an offer over other candidates, but outside of an engineering role it might be the only way to even get called in for an interview.

Since I didn’t catch the 60 minutes special, did it discuss the issue of location and local skills? I’ve noticed there are many more manufacturing plants here in Iowa than I ever saw in Arizona but there is a much smaller population to recruit from locally, which makes finding uncommon skilled trades even more of a challenge. While it’s relatively common for large companies to look out of state to fill engineering roles it’s more difficult for smaller ones to do so, and for skilled trades roles the search is almost exclusively in the local area.

4

I’m currently attending Dunwoody College of Technology in Minnesota… And there is a large demand for manufacturing personnel throughout the world. Just two weeks ago our entire class of 30 were offered a job in Germany, along with job offers from all around the US. Keep in mind we are still over a year from graduating.

My instructors say every year they have companies competing for the students who are graduating, literally the jobs are just handed to them here. The program I am in has had 100% job placement for the last 18 years, and now it is just growing in demand.

5

You can watch the segment here http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50134943n

6

Keep in mind something very important: Overall unemployment is currently pretty high, but when you break it up by education level it becomes pretty clear why.

http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea05.htm

The higher the education, the lower the unemployment rate. For those with a Bachelors or better, unemployment is under 4%!

Our problem here in the US isn’t that we don’t have enough jobs for people… it’s that we have a large chunk of our workforce that isn’t qualified for the jobs we have available! As a society, we’ve transitioned towards needing much more skilled labor. It’s rare to find a job that doesn’t require computer use (Even working as a burger flipper requires you to interact with the restaurants Point of Sales system). Manufacturing jobs are becoming increasingly skill-based every year, especially with our increasing reliance on robotics in manufacturing (It’s not about screwing part A to part B anymore. It’s about monitoring and maintaining equipment that does that faster than you ever could). There are only so many jobs that an unskilled worker can do, which can really limit someone’s career path.

7

The unemployment rate is high because of Corporations going bankrupt ,High gas prices ,High taxes ,No tax breaks for small businesses ,Low amount of people investing…

8

The thing is, large corporations aren’t going bankrupt. They’re either being bailed out by the government, shipping jobs overseas, or both. I hope the future jobs in engineering of students like us will not be the next ones to go.

9

Relative to Europe the United State’s gas prices are very low.

10

As a manufacturing engineer that has finally found a job after 8 months of searching, I have to weigh in on this.

The current methods of recruiting people are horrible. Here are the steps:

  1. Get electronic resume and have computer program scan for keywords.
  2. Pass that stage and have recruiter scan resume for 6 seconds, at best.
  3. Pass that stage and receive a screening phone call by recruiters that have no clue what anything means in your field. (I actually had one recruiter tell me that she was unfamiliar with engineering stuff. Then asked me if I had solid modeling experience in CAD. I rattled off a list of programs I was familiar with. She then asked me again. I told her yes.)
  4. Pass the screening phone call and get an in-person or phone interview with hiring manager/team.
  5. Get job declination or job offer. If it’s a declination, chances are you’re going to wait a significant amount of time and then get a form email that states they’ve decided to go with “someone whose skill set more closely matches what they’re looking for”.

Between recruiters not knowing what is actually needed and lack of feedback from interviewers, it is incredibly difficult for hopeful employees to know what is needed and get across that their skill set matches.

Personally, I think a story about recruiters at these companies not understanding the positions should be done. I know stories about the software systems have been done.

indieFan

11

In the software world bad recruiters are also the norm. Here’s a story about a recruiter targeting a guy because he “had experience with Ruby on Rails”. The guy was actually the inventor of Ruby on Rails.

http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/when-bad-recruiting-is-really-bad-and-a-contest_b8749