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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Manufacturing
They are talking about this topic: Occupation-Specific Skills
The quotes below are about this issue:
Employers need new hires that have a variety of occupation-specific and soft skills; without these skills, new hires are unlikely to advance.
| "I've been in manufacturing engineering for over 30 years, and what I've seen is that my two-year degree people can only get to a certain level because they don't have soft skills. So, I could go to [MnSCU college] and pick up a manufacturer engineer. They've got all those soft skills. They can do project management. They can plan safe innovative thinking and everything else, but they don't know the technical side. They've only skimmed it in school. And they don't know how to square block. They don't know how to make a lathe tool out of a high speed steel block like I learned when I was maybe in middle school. So, what we did at our company, which was good, is that anybody who started—and they all had their two-year degrees on the floor—if anybody jumped into a four-year degree, we'd bring them in the office and say, 'Good!' That was their chance for promotion, getting that four-year degree. But you couldn't get that two-year degree to advance. They needed the soft skills. They just don't have them." | Central |
| "We only have CNCs and our manual equipment, and that's the thing, if you can just change parts on a CNC that's one thing, but to be able to take a drawing, program it, set it up, run it, and inspect it, that's useful." | Northeast |
| "We hire driller helpers, and then it is on-the-job training. And, while you may have good skills as a driller helper and you may understand the drill, to advance to a driller, the soft skills come into play. Being a team leader and being able to stretch goals and being versatile. And sometimes people are demoted because those skills aren't there." | Northeast |
| "In our case, we need drafters. And we need drafters that can get on the phone with architects and talk through a window plan and then draw it themselves, so it is a combination of things." | Northwest |
| "It is kind of a balancing act—of soft skills and technical skills." | Northwest |
| "Maybe, in the past, an operator just made sure the bar stock gets in there or they measure parts. That has really changed. Now, we need someone that understands that this is a computer-operated machine and maybe needs a little tweaking. That's what we're really looking for. So, for some of us, some of these new graduates have actually worked out better than some of our long-tenured employees that are trying to learn a new skill because it's so foreign to them. And they're a little adverse to the change, so it does take some time." | Southwest |
| "Employer 1: We have positions open today that we've been looking to fill for some time. And it's kind of like—I'll describe it as an associate level engineering assistant—that individual with enough mechanical and electrical experience to engineer solutions for the floor. I mean, that's a pretty universal perspective of things. Someone who can move easily through lots of different processes. That's the type of person we've been looking for. Not as specific as the other employer who needs to have specific electro-mechanical skills and all the soldering and all of that. Ours is more general mechanical engineering problem-solving. We need someone with a two-year engineering assistant degree. I'm sure we could work with that. Employer 2: I could use that, too. Employer 1: We're trying to get one, and we probably could use half a dozen of them. Because the people on the line can't do what you're saying. So, our guys who do this, they roll through the plant solving problems and coming up with solutions. And then we try to grow them with automation project—get a chance to grow their skills as well. Question: So, if you're going to hire somebody out of a MnSCU institution, do they have a specific degree in that? What do you hope for? Employer 1: I believe there is an engineering assistant type of program, isn't there? I may not be using the right language. Employer 2: There are manufacturing technology programs. I think what you're talking about is something that I would put under 'mechatronics' or an industrial maintenance type of program. Employer 1: Our guys don't do the maintenance, though. We have maintenance who knows even more obviously, but they kind of just roll through the plant. And they also design the new tools; they are their own draftsman. They're very multi-talented. Employer 2: When I was interviewing the engineers that we're just bringing in—it was for a production job—the hardest thing for me was I felt I was trying to find that unicorn out there in the forest, which is somebody who has an engineering degree. Because it's the best feeder degree that I can find. That's a willingness to say, 'I'm willing to be a production supervisor, and then work my way through operations because I know that I have a future here.' Most of the people that go into engineering want to be CAP engineering. They want to design plants. They want to design lines. They don't want to actually run the line; they don't want to run the plant. If I could get that two-year degree, you know funnel, then those would be my next operations supervisors and managers. Because that would be an excellent feeder for the critical thinking and just the general skill base that I would need." |
Southwest |