How Can You Address the Skills Gap and Workforce Development?

It’s getting harder and harder to find skilled workers for the manufacturing segment. Too many recruiting strategies are based on hiring people away from other companies, keeping them for a couple of years, only to have someone else hire them away from you.

If you want to address the skills gap and improve your workforce development is to focus on training your new employees, not hiring them away from your competitors. While that will certainly work, you’ll no doubt lose them again when someone new comes along and promises them more money.

The best way to recruit new people is to train them and find them at the very beginning of their careers. And the best way to do that? Look at your local trade schools and develop a relationship with them to help you identify the top talent coming out of those schools.

When it comes to recruiting, you can hire the best students and offer them an opportunity for advancement and additional education. And, you can link their compensation to their achievement, meaning you can send them back to school, pay for their education, and increase their pay as they increase their skills.

For many manufacturers, trade schools are becoming more recognized than universities for producing the most skilled workers. That’s why we recruited out of the trade schools for many of our associates.

Send Your Best Associates to Teach at the Local Trade School

You can address the skills gap in your manufacturing operation by recruiting at the trade schools in your area.I’ve often said that it’s not HR’s job to recruit your associates, it’s the managers’ job. After all, they know what they need, they know the skills they’re looking for, and they have the best eye for identifying talent.

Why not send your managers and best associates to scout the local talent by teaching at the local trade schools?

Many of those trade schools don’t necessarily want advanced degrees the same way the universities do. They want people who have years of experience teaching their students. Your long-time associates have years and decades of experience. Why not put that to use and let it benefit your company?

Of course, the associates will get paid to teach classes as well, but you can also make sure they get time off to go teach. After all, your company gets the biggest benefit, so you can invest in a little time off for your associates to put on their teachers’ hats.

For example, we developed our Corrosion College program at Robroy as a way to teach people in the oil and gas industry about the benefits of our products. We also had an accredited college in the area, the Kilgore College for Corrosion. Our faculty would interact with theirs on a regular basis, and Kilgore’s faculty would occasionally do lectures at our own college.

We were also accredited by the University of Ohio so we could offer 15 continuing education credits to our students, all of whom were professionals in the industry and were required to earn CEUs each year.

This was just an informal practice; there was no policy or formal agreement between the two groups. The faculty were able to directly communicate with each other and never had to deal with the administrators. (This was one private-public partnership that worked very well, in my opinion.)

Kilgore even made our Corrosion College part of their curriculum, and their students would go through our program.

By doing this, we were not only able to contribute to the overall knowledge of our industry; many of the Kilgore students were educated in the “Robroy Way” of corrosion prevention — something that benefitted us for years.

And, occasionally, we would find a student who had something they could offer Robroy, and they would soon join the company as an associate, and the circle of life education would continue.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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Author: David Marshall
I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.