The New York Times recently ran an article titled, Robots or Job Training: Manufacturers Grapple With How to Improve Their Economic Fortunes
This might sound like a dry article on manufacturing and the economy, but it provides a lot of food for thought to adult educators interested in career pathways. Below is a lengthy excerpt from the last half of the article. I’ve added the bold text for emphasis.
[T]he Fed appears to be sticking with the standard approach of gradually raising rates to ward off inflation. But the United States may be about to run an experiment on the effects of a high-pressure economy whether Mr. Powell wants to or not. The combination of tax cuts and government spending increases is adding fuel to an economy already burning hot. The Fed’s most recent projections estimate that the unemployment rate will fall to 3.5 percent next year.
If that happens, the beneficiaries could be people like Mike Steffel. Mr. Steffel, 39, grew up near here and never went to college, instead finding work in various low-paying factory jobs. In one position at a local manufacturer, he found himself drawn to the work done by skilled toolmakers.
“I saw what the journeymen were doing there, and I thought that was something that I’d like to be doing as a career,” Mr. Steffel said. “You have this raw stock of steel that’s just sitting there, and making it into something useful, I like the thought of that.”
Eventually, Mr. Steffel saw an ad from APT saying it was hiring and would pay for classes at the local community college. Mr. Steffel works at APT as an apprentice during the two-year certificate program, and is committed to staying a year after it ends. In return, he gets training as a toolmaker, a skill that could ultimately earn him more than $70,000 a year with overtime. And the skills he is gaining are less easily replaced by robots.
“This is the career that I have chosen,” Mr. Steffel said. “I’m not going to get rich off it, but hopefully in the end I’ll do well.”
For Mr. Nighswander, training people like Mr. Steffel is an investment. For years, he said, he complained that the people graduating from local high schools and colleges didn’t have the skills needed. But eventually he realized that he had to tackle the problem himself.
In 2015, APT opened a training center inside its 75,000-square-foot headquarters. Every afternoon during the school year, eight to 10 students from the local high school spend two hours taking hands-on classes in electrical engineering, machining, practical math and other subjects. The students earn school credit, and many also work at APT after hours.
Mr. Nighswander acknowledged that many trainees would never work at APT after graduation. Some may even work for his competitors. But when skilled labor is scarce, he said, companies have to start taking matters into their own hands.
“There’s a whole bunch of gearheads out there, and there always have been, and they’re smart,” Mr. Nighswander said. “If manufacturers are not willing to invest in education, then the only thing they can do is steal an employee from another employer.”
The relevance to adult education is that the programs like the one run by APT are focused on skills that “are less easily replaced by robots”. These are not necessarily the middle skills careers that we focus on in adult education, and which are more likely to be replaced by robots, or at least sooner than the skills being taught by APT. This connects to the next bold text from the article. High schools, which have significantly higher liability issues when sending students out on work-based learning programs, are working with manufacturers like APT, but the article doesn’t mention working with any adult education program in the area. I don’t think that was an oversight, but what are the reasons that make it harder, or maybe just less supported, to have programs like this that work with adult learners?
How are you working with local manufactures to build more manufacturing partnerships for adults? What are the obstacles when working with traditional secondary-age students and adults, and how do we address them so that more adult learners can benefit from existing programs like this one?
Mike Cruse
Career Pathways Moderator
Michaelcruse74@gmail.com