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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Transportation
They are talking about this topic: Occupation-Specific Skills
The quotes below are about this issue:
Basic mechanical skills and aptitude. Mechanical skills and aptitude are essential in candidates, and yet they are often missing as schools move toward specialization. Broad mechanical training is essential.
| "They don't grow up with nuts and bolts in their hands and right now, they're starting from square one where they didn't used to be that way. I see that that's the gap with people, the kids that I hire. The natural skills aren't there." | Metro |
| "You have to hire two guys now, to do one guy's job. You got to have one guy maybe diagnose it and then tell the other guy what to do because he either doesn't have the ability to do that, taking it down, putting it back together, or he doesn't want to do, one of the two." | Metro |
| "A lot of the training is vehicle-specific now and it did not used to be that way when I graduated from [technical school]. We didn't have manufacturer specific programs. We went to learn about cars and about the systems that they use. And makes and models aren't that much different. What they do and how they do it isn't that much different. Some of the training trains that into people to feel that way and the manufacturers have taken a hold of some of the education to do exactly what they're talking about. They can take these college kids and start to train them for their model specifically. So these kids are already ready to go for our make and model, go right from college into their industry where they go up through the General Motors program, they're not going to come over to BMW because BMW isn't going to want them, they got their own program. So the colleges are already starting to train people to be exactly specific and training their minds to think exactly specific when there's a lot bigger world out there and they aren't that much different." | Metro |
| "I think it's easier for us to maybe teach them the people skills. It's easier, I think, to find somebody that'll talk to a customer and look presentable than it is to find somebody that's got talent under the hood, for me." | Metro |
| "Just two quick points. What the education industry can do is don't lose focus on the basics. I know there's a lot of drive, like we said earlier, to go manufacturer-specific, but when they're in college they're learning the basics, and after that, they can go to the direction that they want and I think some of the basics are getting lost." | Metro |