[WRE ADVISOR | BUSINESS]
enough companies are willing to spend the money to properly train their newest workers. For Andrew Mullis, training new hires is just another day at the offi ce. Mullis is a project engineer with Yarbrough Cable in Memphis, TN, and for him, hiring and training are a matched set. “We don’t expect people to walk through the door saying they
know how to splice,” Mullis explains. “We take people unskilled in the rigging industry and for the most part we’re taking our workers and training them how we want them to be trained. We’re taking skills they already have and making them valuable to us.” T e specialized skills needed for the kind of wire work that Yarbrough does means there is always a steep learning curve for both young people entering the industry as well as employees who may have worked in construction, but have never worked on a rigging crew. “We have to teach these guys how to splice slings, how to lay out slings – the basics of wire rope,” says Mullis. “Now we’re having to train a new generation of workers basic speltering procedures. Our guys we have now have been doing it for 30 years. Right now there’s a lot of tribal knowledge that needs to be handed down.” However, Mullis also sees a trend that fi nds older workers leaving the industry while a younger generation is hesitant to fi ll their shoes. “Nobody thinks to knock on a rigging shop’s door,” says Mullis.
“It’s dirty work. It’s exhausting.” Most of the high skilled jobs the BCG study addresses require a high school diploma and on-the-job-training. Some manufacturers recruit workers in high schools, but these candidates can be found wanting. Pat Poe is president of Cumberland Sales Company – an industrial supplies distributor and equipment manufacturer in Nashville, Tennessee. For Poe, hiring has always been defi ned by two types of employees. Regardless of reported trends, Poe insists these dedicated and less-than-dedicated workers have always made up the front lines of the struggle for skilled laborers in his warehouses. “I’ve been here 33 years and it’s an ongoing thing,” he explains.
“We have 15 year vets, but we also go through periods with more turnover. You do have great people who will learn and stay and stick with the company, but you also have ones who are forever fl oating.” T e workers at Cumberland Sales handle expected warehousing duties, including operating forklifts and cable winding equipment, and engaging in some fabrication. In addition, there’s an emphasis on learning to use the equipment effi ciently and safely, Cumberland’s warehouse laborers have to be ready with a quick head for numbers. “We deal in numbers,” says Poe. “A customer wants something cut to length. A lot of people applying here have never seen a tape measure. T e guys need a basic understanding of math,” says Poe. “We’re continuously doing inventory. You’ve got to be able to count. We’re a counting business. We take this for granted, but these are basic skills that often are just not there before they can learn the specialized needs of our industry.” Jo Ann Whetsell is the Marketing and Advertising Manager at Ken
Forging, a family-owned drop-forged industrial hardware manufacturer. For Whetsell, the lack of skilled laborers is a very real problem. “Studies from our own state of Ohio verifi es there is an extreme
shortage of qualifi ed workers,” she says. “We need workers prepared to enter the workforce.” But, for Whetsell, and others recruiting and managing new hires in the industry, fi nding even minimally prepared employees can be a real challenge. In some companies, just getting
workers to show up on a regular basis can be diffi cult, and many fi rms have resorted to competency tests, trial periods for new hires and the tying of profi t-sharing incentives to attendance in order to ensure a more dependable workforce. T is lack of basic skills among young workers has many states – including Ohio – steering some of their educational resources to vocational training in high schools and community colleges. In an eff ort to cultivate more educated employees, more than half of the manufacturers surveyed in the study have also partnered with community colleges to create and off er training programs that serve as gateways for potential hires and recruiters alike. In response to this trend, President Obama recently pledged $500 million in grants to community colleges around the country for “the development and expansion of innovative training programs.” But, with recent and projected budget cuts, expecting the education system to come to the rescue where training skilled laborers is concerned might be wishful thinking. “We need more qualifi ed, skilled workers, but that means we need
more teachers,” says Whetsell. “It’s a real problem we’re going to have to solve.”
According to the study, rising U.S. exports and the commitments a number of companies have made to return their manufacturing in the U.S. – fl eeing high labor and energy costs in China, Japan and Europe – are other factors that are ramping-up competition for skilled labor. T e study found nearly half of manufacturers surveyed responded that “better access to skilled workforce or talent” kept them from moving off -shore in the fi rst place. Although there will likely be acute shortages in specifi c regions, T e Boston Consulting Group doesn’t foresee a skilled labor disaster in the offi ng. In fact, the study’s authors ultimately predict that skilled, ambitious candidates will keep pace with the expanding manufacturing sector, creating an American-made renaissance by 2020. And that’s the kind of problem we’d all love to have. ❙
WIRE ROPE EXCHANGE JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2013 77
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