Upskilling and Reskilling: Industry Insights to Success

We are back with more best practices to share from Tooling U-SME’s tuX event. These are proven approaches that can help you attract, develop and retain your teams.

Recently, we shared a blog post with insights from Matthew Hladki, Chief Administrative Officer, Grede, about the powerful potential of generative artificial intelligence to improve onboarding.

Today, I’m sharing ideas from an extraordinary panel “Upskilling and Reskilling Initiatives for the Future of Manufacturing” that I was pleased to moderate which featured three terrific panelists:

• Emily Caballero, Learning and Development Manager, Component Repair Technologies, Inc.
• Reagan Reid, Senior Organization Development Specialist, Pella Corporation
• Dr. Stacy Seaworth, Aerospace Operations Training Manager, Woodward Inc.

All three introduced real-world solutions to upskilling and reskilling for manufacturing that may work for your company.

Mentoring Leads the Way

How appropriate that the company I am going to discuss first was founded in Mentor, Ohio. Component Repair Technologies, Inc. (CRT) has been a maintenance, repair, and overhaul leader for nearly 40 years. They are a manufacturer that fosters that culture of continuous learning and empowerment to thrive and contribute to the company’s success. I’d call that mentoring!

Emily Caballero at CRT explained their business focus, “We’re not traditional manufacturing. We use manufacturing practices to repair gas turbine engines.”

These engines go in commercial aircraft, oil platforms, cruise ships and more. CRT uses manufacturing practices to repair these components — and a big challenge is that every repair is a little bit different. 

During and after the pandemic, Emily said CRT was struggling with recruitment and training challenges as most manufacturers were.

“We had a stagnant headcount, not to mention, we have over 27 different processes under one roof,” said Emily. “We had lots of different skill sets to train to, especially since not every single repair is the same.”

Emily said they asked themselves: What programs would potential candidates want from an organization? That led them to develop several impactful programs:

• Internal Mechanical Technology Degree (associate degree). CRT partnered with a local community college to design a curriculum geared to their needs. Taught by current employees, engineers who are experts in their field, the program is half online and half onsite. Having classes conveniently on campus removed a common barrier to pursuing a degree.
  
  
• SOAR Summer Bridge Program. This program, designed for recently graduated high school seniors, has allowed CRT to foster close relationships with local schools and career technical education programs…and hire students right out of high school.
  
  
• Leadership University. This internal leadership 101 program offers two different groups: “Leading Self,” for the individual contributor who wants to improve their skills, communication and emotional intelligence as they prepare to take on a future leadership role, and “Leading Others,” for those ready to step into a leadership position (or just starting one for the first time).

With continual honing of the programs through data and gap analysis, improved onboarding, and review of training records and evaluations, they are seeing impressive results.

• 60% of the graduates from the first class of the Mechanical Engineering Technology Degree graduated in May 2023 have been promoted.
• The SOAR Summer Bridge Program boasts 60% retention after 18 months. Fifteen percent of those students have enrolled in the engineering degree program and 22 percent have been promoted.
• 100% of internal candidates have customized professional development plans.
• 100% of production supervisors have gone through leadership training or will go through in 2024.

“Eliminating the one size fits all approach, we were able to do a lot of this,” said Emily. “If you are going to design programs make sure they’re adaptable and scalable.” 

It’s obvious that CRT is committed to quality, their employees and customers. Continuous improvement has been, and will continue to be, the key to their success.

Pella’s Commitment to People

Pella Corporation is another manufacturer committed to a strong people culture. Pella is a leading window and door manufacturer, headquartered in Pella, Iowa, with upwards of 10,000 team members and 20 manufacturing sites across the U.S.

Reagan Reid at Pella noted that their specific business challenges for hiring technical talent are both internal and external. 

“Externally, we've faced factors such as a job market shortage of trade work in our area and competition with other great employers, but we also had silos of our own with internal pathways,” she explained. “We kept coming back to trying to identify a way to upscale our production team members to fill our technical needs.”

Reagan said one immediate need was filling their maintenance technician openings and building a pipeline. 

“We wanted to create a process that allowed our internal team members to become qualified maintenance technicians, make team members aware of our needs, engage their interests, and influence team member engagement of the internal team members through promotional and development opportunities,” she said.

Pella’s solution was to create a technical trades apprenticeship program specifically for maintenance with the goal of rolling it out to other technical roles in the future. They wanted to create a program that would help with the scalability and consistency they desired across all facilities.

“At its core, this program is a full-time apprenticeship position for internal use,” Reagan said. “It's an earn-as-you-learn model so the team member enters into this apprenticeship role and they're compensated as a skilled production team member.”

The program is a minimum of six months with a maximum of one year in the role. The apprentice completes job specific competencies identified by Pella subject matter experts as well as required coursework that is either instructor-led or Tooling U-SME e-learning. 

Additional elements of the program include on-the-job training, mentorship/coaching (including certified mentors), and competency assessments.

The program was piloted at the Pella, Iowa, site in October of 2023. Now the program has expanded to five apprentices in roles across three different Pella facilities. 

“Since rolling this out we have seen an increase in qualified candidates by utilizing that internal candidate pool,” said Reagan.

To show the impact, Reagan said that before they rolled out the maintenance technician apprentice position, they had 140 job bids internally with no qualified bidders. Following the pilot program, they have bid three apprentice positions at the Pella, Iowa, site with 43 internal qualified applicants.

“They are considered qualified with aptitude to learn and grow with our commitment to upskilling them into that maintenance position,” said Reagan.

“That's just our culture,” she added. “We believe the culture that we create is the key to our success and we do this through creating a talent advantage.” 

Positive Learning Environment at Woodward

I have one more success story to share. This is from Woodward headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, a 150-year-old global leader in the design, manufacture, and service of energy conversion and control solutions for the aerospace and industrial equipment markets. Woodward operates in commercial, military, and government programs.

Dr. Stacy Seaworth said Woodward’s challenges are similar to most manufacturers: attracting and retaining the best talent. 

Stacy highlighted their basic machinist training program started in the fall of 2022. The centerpiece is their five-axis CNC lathe training program. 

“It's the most complex machine that we have in any of our aerospace Woodward plants so our approach to solving the problem of not having enough of those technical applicants and skills in the workplace was fourfold,” Stacy said.

The program is eight weeks long, 64 hours, and the company covers tuition costs for attendees and pays their hourly wage while there. Generally, members spend four hours training two days a week, and work on the job for the rest of their shift. 

Training starts with a two-week onboarding program. The first week covers foundational elements and the second focuses on specific skills based on which area the employee goes into: machining, deburring, special process, sub-assembly or assembly.

After onboarding, two key training programs, among others, are in place: one with Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill. and a Virtual Reality (VR) MULTUS training program. 

“We recognized that we didn't have the ability to train all of the machining in-house because we didn't have a MULTUS sitting idly by to be able to do training on,” Stacy said. “Rock Valley College is able to help us with some of that while we're also teaching on-the-job training.”

She said Woodward has also incorporated VR. 

“We’ve added this other modality to increase our engagement and to help with retention,” she said. “VR gives our members a safe environment in which to learn the skills they need on a daily basis.” 

Woodward is seeing success. They have now put 60 members through the program.

“The big return on investment for us is if we save one spindle crash on that machine, we've covered the cost of the entire program,” Stacy said.

It’s a win for the entire community. Woodward partnered with other local manufacturers in the community who benefit as well, and the program is open to anyone in the Rockford community who wants to attend. This also gives an attendance boost to Rock Valley College.

“At Woodward, we've learned along the way that if you want to be successful, you have to have a positive learning environment,” said Stacy. “The big thing for us is to create that environment where our leaders understand the value of what we do and buy into it with resources and time.”

I hope you are as inspired as I was after hearing these stories. Kudos to Component Repair Technologies, Pella, and Woodward for leading the way in skilling and reskilling their workforces. 

For more details on this topic, check out the presentation recap from tuX 2024! Over 100 workforce development manufacturing professionals gathered at Pittsburgh’s tuXperience Workforce Development conference. tuX promotes overall best practices in training and workforce development, encourages the adoption of advanced technologies, and furthers the success of the U.S. Manufacturing industry.

We are always available to discuss ways to improve your workforce's onboarding. Our team can design a training program that delivers improved quality and productivity, along with increased employee satisfaction and retention. Contact Tooling U-SME at 866.706.8665 to learn more.