Is it just me or is it getting more and more difficult to find junior workers with skill and ambition. In the past three years I have gone through 4 different toolmaker apprentices at different stages in their training and 2 guys just out of school looking to become apprentices. In order to be a good machinist or toolmaker there has to be a level of intelligence and ambition that these individuals all seemed to lack. There have been a lot of plant closures in our area where a lot of unskilled assembly workers were laid off to the point where there were government agencies set up to help these people find new careers. In most cases the human resource “professionals” that worked for these agencies encouraged the unskilled and laid off workers to get in to skilled trades. Our local colleges set up new courses to accommodate these people for retraining in the skilled trades with many of them intending to become machinists and toolmakers. There was a flood of new blood in our trade and I was receiving dozens of resumes a month from the graduates of these new programs looking for work. The problem is none of the individuals were any good, I tried a few that interviewed well and had decent resumes but one almost got himself killed, no injury occurred thank god, but none the less a scary moment because of a stupid mistake in judgment resulting in his dismissal. The other person I hired quit after 4 days because “this job isn’t what I expected”, he obviously didn’t like the fact that he actually had to work.
There are obvious problems in our area with the skilled trades and I feel it is a societal issue, no one wants their kids to do trade work as it has developed a stigma of being for people of lesser intelligence. I look back at when I first decided to do an apprenticeship, I was in grade 10 in the early 90’s I was an average student not good at languages but I excelled in physical sciences and mathematics and I enjoyed getting my hands dirty and building stuff. By half way through grade 12 I had decided to become a tool and die maker, I remember being called in to see the guidance counselor and he asked me why I hadn’t applied to any colleges or universities, when I told him I wasn’t going on to any post-secondary education and that I intended to do an apprenticeship, he looked at me like I had 2 heads and proceeded to tell me that if I didn’t go to college or university I would never amount to anything. Now I am not going to talk about what I have accomplished since but let’s just say he was very wrong. The problem I have with what happened is that everyone who graduates high school is faced with the same dilemma of what to do next and unfortunately the students who would make excellent machinists, toolmakers, millwrights and welders are discouraged from doing the apprenticeships and sent in other directions. This likely has to do with money as the governments make a tremendous amount of income off post-secondary education and student loans and people who do apprenticeships like me never have student loans, although I have been paying income tax every year since I was 17, so maybe it is something else.
There are few resources to find skilled hardworking individuals to work in the skilled trades and the few that do exist do nothing to filter out the good from the bad. The hardest thing I ever had to do as shop manager was tell a 23 year old kid that he chose the wrong career path and he didn’t have what it took to be a machinist. Maybe someday I will find that elusive 20 year old that has the skill and ability to really excel in this industry and when I do find that white whale I will name him Moby Dick.