IMC-2018 Learning Session 44:57

by George Siminoff and Jimmy Crook, The Wonderful Company

Companies continue to become more asset intensive. Automation is increasing, and becoming increasingly more complex. The days of old where most skills were developed in an apprenticeship program are almost gone, and with very few working on the modern D22‚ "Electro-Mech", Technician skillsets required in today's factories. Tech schools and community colleges offer training on these skillsets but in many cases, these skills fail to translate to the shop floor without the apprenticeship framework to prepare technicians for what they will face. This includes the availability of seasoned experts that have mastered their skills on the modern shop floor and are now educators. We are almost an extinct breed. The result is an increasingly larger gap between equipment and demonstrated competencies required by technicians to maintain them. The alternative is high costs, a reactive environment, and more capital expenditures with openings for technicians going unfilled for long periods of time. This presentation will communicate an example of what we are doing to mitigate this gap and build a sustainable system of training and validating demonstrated competencies on the shop floor...something that may appear to some looking like the taboo term an "apprenticeship".