How to find good help in a production machine/toolmaker shop

[7milesup]

I work in a production type evironment . The company hires anyone willing to walk thru the door . No experience , no mechanical abilities . No training from the company . Most have their smart phones going 8-12 hrs while at work . Company policy states phones are for emergencies only . LMAO , they are well aware of what goes on and nothing , NOTHING is ever said to these employees . They walk away from the lines , crash them , walk out the door , take a long break when the line goes down etc etc . Management doesn't seem to give 2 $hits about it . We've lost more than a few great employees because of the situation and I can't blame them one bit .

That is a particular company's problem. You have complained about that place a lot. Management AND the employees have decided somewhere along the line that is how they want to run their business. The place I work at is the complete opposite. Pick your poison.

 

[rodm1]

Hate to say it but migrants seem to stay and are better workers then the current crop of young people.

 

[cjtoombs]

I think citing pay is over-simplifying. It doesn't matter how much you offer if there are no qualified candidates - which in fields like machining is quite likely. Part of this is because 30 years ago or so we (society) decided that anyone with a college degree was more valuable than "simple trades". Fast forward to today and you have a bunch of nitwits with degrees, including some who would have thrived in a vocational field. The only option, in such a case, is to try to find someone that's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and be willing to train them. (Ignoring the sad state of how little is necessary to get a HS diploma these days...)

I'm also an engineer, but things were different, I guess, when I went to school. I remember having conversations with my classmates as we approached graduation around "Do you feel like an engineer? I don't feel like an engineer yet." I think we all (mostly) understood that we'd just earned our learner's permits. I definitely saw the flip-side in some of the new engineers that I worked with - those that thought they'd learned everything there was to learn while in school. I've only been an engineer for ~30 years and I'm semi-retired now, but I'm still learning...

GsT

I don't think it's an oversimplification. It's not that there are NO qualified candidates, its that you have to compete with others for those qualified candidates. And over a long time period, that includes competition for what education people want to get. There are many still out there who either don't want to get a college education or are not cut out for college because of the way that they learn that would have interest in vocational training. It is quite attractive to someone who doesn't want to spend 4+ years and possibly go deep in debt to get a BS or BA. One of the problems with machinists is that they have been the trade that is likely most effected by the offshoring of low end manufacturing over the last 40 years or so. Every factory that made products that are now made offshore employed machinists, either directly in house or indirectly, to build and maintain molds, tooling, and jigs for production. That means there has been a steady decline in the need for those machinists. This pushed people to other areas of education, including many of the former machinists who lost their jobs. Perhaps now we are starting to see a reversal, not all manufacturing is going to be outsourced, after all. But there is still a time constant. If the wages of machinists are going up, people will try to get into the field, but that will likely take over a year. It will also take some time for people to realize that it's not a dying profession. So it all comes down to compensation, and to some extent quality of life. If pay were equal, machinist would be a much better choice than plumber, because you don't have to work in poo in the outdoors. There are news articles all the time about some industry or another that's unable to hire people. Guess what? You have to pay people enough to want to choose that profession over other competing professions, and if it requires a long time to train, then you will just have to compete with others in your industry for that talent until the pipeline starts spitting out more qualified people.

 

[cjtoombs]

Hate to say it but migrants seem to stay and are better workers then the current crop of young people.

Most of them come from what most of us would consider pretty horrible places, so they have a lot of motivation to succeed. Failure is not an option for them, they have no safety net.

 

[pontiac428]

I am a seasoned journeyman professional in my field, and I work in a department full of my peers. We have hired many people the last few years, with varying levels of youth, education, and apparent wherewithal. None of the young people stay very long. Too long a road to walk, too high a hill to climb, too much paying it forward. They want their monumental student loans paid off by whoever hires them first. We've seen a dozen come and go. No work ethic, no brilliant insights, no demonstration of knowledge of concept. These people suck. I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm a wizard at what I do, but I'm not going to invest in these idiots, they can figure it out like I did, by pulling the source material up and reading until I'm an expert. They just hired a guy with a recent MS (who wants loan repayment) with count-on-one-hand years of experience, and they offered him MY salary. The one I worked my way up for, and it took 15 years. But desperation is what it is. I told my boss exactly how I would train him if he comes to me with questions- I'll drop the book on my desk and say have fun, you're paid well enough to figure this out on your own. Boss had no room to argue that point. Makes me feel like chopped liver, though.

 

[cjtoombs]

I am a seasoned journeyman professional in my field, and I work in a department full of my peers. We have hired many people the last few years, with varying levels of youth, education, and apparent wherewithal. None of the young people stay very long. Too long a road to walk, too high a hill to climb, too much paying it forward. They want their monumental student loans paid off by whoever hires them first. We've seen a dozen come and go. No work ethic, no brilliant insights, no demonstration of knowledge of concept. These people suck. I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm a wizard at what I do, but I'm not going to invest in these idiots, they can figure it out like I did, by pulling the source material up and reading until I'm an expert. They just hired a guy with a recent MS (who wants loan repayment) with count-on-one-hand years of experience, and they offered him MY salary. The one I worked my way up for, and it took 15 years. But desperation is what it is. I told my boss exactly how I would train him if he comes to me with questions- I'll drop the book on my desk and say have fun, you're paid well enough to figure this out on your own. Boss had no room to argue that point. Makes me feel like chopped liver, though.

It seems the way it's done nowadays is to not work anywhere more than about 3 years before moving on. Both employers and younger workers seem to be onboard with this. Of course, there isn't anything holding people down anymore except their own desires. At one point pension vestment tended to keep people on, then it was health insurance. Of course, worker mobility is better for wages overall, so that's not a knock. I'm pretty risk averse, so I work for the government, one of the few places where you still get a pension and you won't be laid off, but I've moved around a lot in the organization over the last 20 years or so.

 

[vtcnc]

I am a seasoned journeyman professional in my field, and I work in a department full of my peers. We have hired many people the last few years, with varying levels of youth, education, and apparent wherewithal. None of the young people stay very long. Too long a road to walk, too high a hill to climb, too much paying it forward. They want their monumental student loans paid off by whoever hires them first. We've seen a dozen come and go. No work ethic, no brilliant insights, no demonstration of knowledge of concept. These people suck. I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm a wizard at what I do, but I'm not going to invest in these idiots, they can figure it out like I did, by pulling the source material up and reading until I'm an expert. They just hired a guy with a recent MS (who wants loan repayment) with count-on-one-hand years of experience, and they offered him MY salary. The one I worked my way up for, and it took 15 years. But desperation is what it is. I told my boss exactly how I would train him if he comes to me with questions- I'll drop the book on my desk and say have fun, you're paid well enough to figure this out on your own. Boss had no room to argue that point. Makes me feel like chopped liver, though.

Curious…what is your journeyman profession where an MS grad is getting hired?


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[pontiac428]

That's part of my beef, I am a dedicated civil servant who entered government service for stability and a defined career track (I didn't come to the gov't to get rich, famous, or to have smoke blown up my azz). None of that stuff matters if they can dismantle it and serve it up in bits to employees who haven't demonstrated any loyalty to government service. In my field, you MUST relocate periodically in order to achieve the breadth of experience needed to be a competent person or a subject matter expert. Nobody goes from starting pay to supervisor without moving around to get there... at least, up until now, that's how it's been. These kids don't even appreciate the shortcuts people are taking to employ them. Management is bending over backwards to attract these people, while I'm still here, on the track I started in, and I don't want to be devalued by letting them give new college grads all the perks on day one. They don't see that as anything more than an entitlement. I had to spend 2 decades seeing my come up as a rite of passage, now it's all on the table like cheap hand-out trinkets to lure them in.

 

[vtcnc]

I see that makes sense. That must be frustrating. Sorry to hear that.

There are a lot of good points made on this thread.

I attribute most of the changes and subsequent frustration is incumbent workers have with two things: general inflation and then the acceleration of that resulting from the pandemic.


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[pontiac428]

Curious…what is your journeyman profession where an MS grad is getting hired?


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I am an industrial hygienist. We require a very specific course load and a bachelor's at minimum, but we get a lot of MS and PHD candidates. MS is the sweet spot. We're supposed to be interdisciplinary scientists, because chemists don't know biology and engineers don't know toxicology. Another word is unicorn, because finding an employable one is like a fairy tale. We only work for the government and for a handful of Fortune 500 companies who are large enough to tell government regulators how their workforce health and safety program will look and be managed. Most of us are consultants in the civilian world. I am like a consultant to commands within the Navy, currently. I started my career and am a veteran of the Army; I will need to relocate to go back, but the Navy has better oceanfront real estate.

I should have never left my job teaching French at the women's college.

If you look up Industrial Hygienist on wikipedia, you'll see a photo of one of my dumbass former colleagues (officers are a fine bunch) grinning at you.