Continuing Education… On a CNC?

Shop owners and major machining departments are discovering the untapped and potential enhancements for worker skill sets.

Shop owners and production department supervisors: Have you ever thought of sending your CNC machine operators, programmers and maintenance personnel back to school? Sure, it would be a boost to productivity, but is it worth the cost, which you’ve heard is pretty substantial? If this is your thinking, keep reading!

The facts of the matter are these: First, in today’s competitive environment, you can’t afford not to keep pace with every other shop in town, maybe the world, because so many countries have initiated worker training and re-training programs with their local community colleges and vocational-technical schools.

Here in America, especially in the heavy manufacturing states like the one in which I reside, funds are now being made available to the local colleges and votech schools to partner with machine tool builders and CNC suppliers, when those parties are education-friendly, to install more machine shops or, at the least, training classrooms with simulators on them, so parts can programmed and virtually cut on a CNC machine.

This move is in response to various factors including world market conditions, plus the states are seeking to keep and attract more metalworking manufacturing. As the old adage goes, nothing gets built until somebody makes the parts.

Dollars in my state are currently being channeled to over 50 schools, many of whom have approached machine tool builders and CNC suppliers like us. Funds are often being repurposed to buy machines, software, CNC seat licenses for training purposes and programming tools, as well as maintenance training programs and support.

In approaching us as CNC suppliers, we’ve opened discussions with our machine builder customers to help facilitate this process. The results are two-fold: Not only are more qualified young personnel entering the market and more experienced people getting re-trained on the newest equipment and technologies, but another group is emerging from this initiative.

Namely, we are seeing a growing number of “solution partner” companies taking the training so that they can become qualified retrofitters and integrators. In Europe, these are called contractors, who gain their certification from a machine builder or control supplier, enabling them to enter a national data base of support personnel in the field.

In this way, we see industry, schools and machine builders cooperating in a spirit that doesn’t say, “What can you do for me?” but rather, “What can we do together to make our shops better and improve our overall economic conditions?”
This sheds an entirely new light on continuing education and the enhancement of worker skill sets in today’s competitive environment.

As a sidebar to this process, we also see another trend emerging. That is the number of women in the manufacturing arena, especially in the metalworking world. Long a bastion of male dominance, the modern machine shop is now open to workers of all types, who bring both mechanical and computer skills, programming and hands-on interests, even an interest in the maintenance of sophisticated hardware and software devices to an industrial setting.

To which I say, “vive la différence!”

From our perspective as a CNC supplier, then, this exciting development will signal a new day in machining, with more skilled workers entering the market, more of us old dogs learning new tricks and perhaps, best of all, a better economic outlook and a better looking shop team!