The urgent need around the country for Maintenance Technicians-What works for you ?

Good Afternoon ,

I know this issue has been discussed on here before , but I'm just wondering if any trends have changed. The shortage of Maintenance
Technicians......

How are your companies dealing with these needs ?

Have you tried to train regular maintenance mechanics with no electrical
experience ? If so , did you have any success ?

What outside efforts have your Human Resource Dept. done ,did they use
Indeed , Manpower , Community Colleges , etc. ?

Who usually makes the effort to fill these positions the most in your
plants , the Human Resource Department , or the Maintenance Manager ?

Does your Human Resource Departments , understand the skillset that is
needed to fill the position ?

Do they understand how urgent it is , that we have a shortage of these
skilled trades ?

Thanks so much, in advance, for sharing your experiences

Sounds like the same situation in Nebraska. We have a program that started 4 months ago at the community college, Manufacturing Maintenance, which is a customized, non-credit training program designed to meet the needs and wants of area manufactures. Some manufactures have a big budget to offer a 5-10/hr more than the competitors and they don't seem to be struggling. On the flip side, some have recognized that they can't compete and decided to build the skill sets internally. To promote the manufacturing maintenance program, I've toured and listened specifically to the Maintenance Supervisor/Manager along with HR. I always get the real story when the Maintenance Supervisor is part of the discussion. Electrical troubleshooting is on the top of the list for training needs along with control systems and PLC's. But I've had a request for mechanical training as well with the emphasis on basic mechanical skill sets. I don't hesitate to offer training during nights or weekends and maybe its once or twice a week. Scheduling is completely in their hands. I am a one man show; I listen, develop outlines and proposals, schedule training and instructor as well. Another part of the equation is work force training funds from the state department. Having those funds will certainly help reduce the costs of training. One of my biggest road blocks is getting adequate funds for the equipment from both AB and Siemens. The Siemens program, SCE (Siemens cooperates with Education) , offers packages up to 90% off. Allen Bradley offers educational discounts as well, but not at the Siemens level. That's a small piece of what's happening here.
On the credit side, the Electro-mechanical program graduates 20 each year.

Cydog said:

Good Afternoon ,

I know this issue has been discussed on here before , but I'm just wondering if any trends have changed. The shortage of Maintenance
Technicians......

How are your companies dealing with these needs ?

We mostly bury our heads in the sand and force overtime on the people we have.

Have you tried to train regular maintenance mechanics with no electrical
experience ? If so , did you have any success ?

The success rate for that in my experience is less than 10%. There is a very good reason that an electrical apprenticeship is 5 years.
What outside efforts have your Human Resource Dept. done ,did they use
Indeed , Manpower , Community Colleges , etc. ?

The company I work for hired a head hunter.

Who usually makes the effort to fill these positions the most in your
plants , the Human Resource Department , or the Maintenance Manager ?

HR

Does your Human Resource Departments , understand the skillset that is
needed to fill the position ?

Not in the least. We hired a guy that was going to school for robotics, but had zero experience over a person that had 15 years experience and was a licenced electrician. The reasoning given was that 1.5 years of school is better than 15 years of doing.

Do they understand how urgent it is , that we have a shortage of these
skilled trades ?

Only when it hurts their bank account.

Thanks so much, in advance, for sharing your experiences

Click to expand...

I have said it before, and I will say it again. The shortage of skilled maintenance people is caused solely by money, or lack thereof. Companies are no longer willing to take someone green as the Spring grass and put them through a full apprenticeship. If you're lucky, you might find an employer that is willing to put two or three people through one of these "accelerated learning" classes that claims that they will teach people the electrical and mechanical skills they need to be successful in 12 weeks with classes held twice a week for four hours per day. While there is nothing wrong with these sorts of classes, they certainly fall well short of providing any sort of in depth knowledge.
Another issue the number of companies that feel that for $18 per/hr they should be able to hire someone that can function as an advanced mechanic, PLC technician, engineering tech, and be happy to clean the toilets and mop the floors in their free time.
When companies learn that they need to invest real money in training skilled workers, and the rate of pay starts to equal the level of effort, skills, and knowledge required, the shortage will begin to disappear. Until then guys like me have no trouble finding work.

Bubba.

I worked with a service person out of Chicago for a few years when he was in Detroit. He announced his retirement about 2 years early, but his employer didn't hire an apprentice to learn the machines he worked on. His employer was the multi-state distributor for the line, including parts and service.


When he retired the distributor sent an email to all customers that they could not replace him and thus are no longer providing service on the machines. [Technically involved machines with 8 cameras and 20 servo controlled axis']



I have customers that hire kids right out of McDonald's, and one that hired a car porter that got fired from a Ford dealership (for a good reason), and are just putting up with them not being able to troubleshoot or fix anything.


Brings to mind the one maintenance technician in Futureworld, because the robot tech's couldn't get wet.

This is perhaps a problem the world over. For a given locale, look up jobs for whatever the local term for PLC technician is. Find the ones with salaries. Do the same but for java developer or whatever term your other guys are going to use.
Perhaps already you see the problem?
Now add a discount for "no travel", perhaps for "no callouts at 2am", some danger money, less stress because if your program goes down it's just a stupid web app anyway...

I think the global work organism is realising that perhaps some factories can't afford to need a full time PLC tech, using work methods from the 70s. Industry 4.0 and all that.

That said, there is so much many to be made from good (expensive) PLC techs on staff. "oh I decreased cycle time 1%". Kaching!£€$

Getting and keeping good people is difficult.
Think about it. There is a bell curve of human ability.
Actually there are many bell curves and those you want are in the top percentiles of many bell curves. This leaves a very small minority that can actually produce.
Do you want people with an IQ of less than 100 working on your equipment?
That excludes half the population. There are smart people with health problems, mental problems, family problems and other problems that limit the pool even more. Now what percentage of those that are capable want to to maintenance? As the world gets to be more technical there will be fewer and fewer people able to keep up. This is why the more capable are getting richer.

This hits home right now. Where I work we're already short on maintenance staff (by my assessment) and half of the staff we have is to be retired in three years. One of the staff should have retired already, but his pension plans got derailed when his wife didn't want to downsize.

This is the only instrument tech, one out of two electricians, Team Leader (mech biased) and scheduler/planner (electrically biased). There's also the problem that the team leader has just beaten cancer and the experience changed his outlook on life a fair bit so he'll definitely retire sooner.

There is a struggle to find people and at the same time, the company is reluctant to open more positions too even when told that we need to prepare people to take over and they need to first understand the equipment so that they can then start looking towards planning of maintenance.

One of the problems is definitely money... the site is located in a somewhat affluent area and the nearest city is an electronics, pharma and medical hub where money is plentiful.

The other issue I see is that maintenance work is dull and boring and where before a few upgrades or projects would be done in house to have people do something creative or different, nowadays with bare maintenance crews everything is handed over to contractors.

This is where I get to beat my own chest a little, and stroke my own ego.
I quit my last job after ten years as a maintenance tech and supervisor, running the entire plant with two guys per shift, plus my self. (Granted, I was working 65+ hours a week), and I had us down to 4% down time.
I worked very hard with all of the crew training them, and keeping their skills sharpened.
When I quit, four of the others left shortly after.
Now, they have 19 people, and are running at 22% or worse, down time.


There is no replacement for skill and training!

Need to start young.... https://www.mfgday.com/

Manufacturing Day is October 4

Originally posted by Cydog with responses in BLUE:

Cydog said:

Good Afternoon ,

I know this issue has been discussed on here before , but I'm just wondering if any trends have changed. The shortage of Maintenance
Technicians......

How are your companies dealing with these needs ?
After years of struggling, the company I work for (with prompting from Maintenance and Engineering) has finally started actively training new hires. In the past, we just hired people and hoped they learned the proper ways to maintain, troubleshoot and fix our equipment. Now we learn their shortcomings prior to hiring, evaluate them after hire and require them to take the training that the evaluation shows they need. This training is a requirement of remaining employed with us.

Have you tried to train regular maintenance mechanics with no electrical
experience ? If so , did you have any success ?
We have had limited success. We are still evaluating how our training program is going, though. Success is dependent on how motivated the employee is. Motivated ones learn what they need to and unmotivated ones always lean on the experienced people.

What outside efforts have your Human Resource Dept. done ,did they use
Indeed , Manpower , Community Colleges , etc. ?
Our HR department in recent years has focused on things other than hiring. They leave that up to temp agencies and recruiters. We have struggled to get the recruiters to understand our needs. It usually takes a couple conference calls between the recruiter, HR, Maintenance and Engineering to help them understand our needs. That doesn't always work, though. Fortunately, we have been able to find one company that "gets it" and has been sending some better candidates our way. In addition to head hunters, we have also been in contact with a local college which has helped us set up an evaluation program, training plans and even a state-sponsored apprenticeship.

Who usually makes the effort to fill these positions the most in your
plants , the Human Resource Department , or the Maintenance Manager ?
The Maintenance Manager. HR has too many other positions to fill as well as all of the other tasks associated with HR.

Does your Human Resource Departments , understand the skillset that is
needed to fill the position ?
Not initially and not completely. We do our best to help them understand. None of them have ever worked directly on the plant floor, so they don't really get it.

Do they understand how urgent it is , that we have a shortage of these
skilled trades ?
They are really starting to get it now. We have struggled for MONTHS trying to fill a couple positions. We have turned many candidates away. Now that we have actually hired a couple people with the "right stuff", they see just what the others were missing. Now that they understand the shortage, they have been more supportive of our evaluation and training efforts.

Thanks so much, in advance, for sharing your experiences

Click to expand...

willxfmr said:

I have said it before, and I will say it again. The shortage of skilled maintenance people is caused solely by money, or lack thereof.

Click to expand...

This is exactly it. Management says to do more with less when times are bad, then times get good and they want to make them even better by doing even more with even less. Suddenly this creates even worse times, because you can't fulfill basic requirements.

We have been taking interns from the local community college industrial maintenance program. We have hired 2 of them, but now we are fully staffed. We still take the interns with the understanding that we don't have a position open at this time. This does get them some OTJ experience and gets us a list of people to contact the next time we are looking for tech.

this is my opinion as I see it.

Most of today's kids are lazy and do not want to work.
they want the $30/hr. job and play on their cell phones and do little work.

at my plant, we see this all the time.
we start people out at $16/hr. to sweep floors and they last 1-2 weeks and quit.
even the skilled workers who know we have random drug tests fail the test when they get chosen, show up half drunk, call in sick on a regular basis, or show up late.

I understand the frustration when you are fresh out of technical school with no work experience. We hire those with no experience at times and give them training, only to have them quit after 3-9 months for a higher paying job doing the same thing.

this is a great place to work, great benefits and everything and we still have trouble keeping workers.

james

James Mcquade said:

We hire those with no experience at times and give them training, only to have them quit after 3-9 months for a higher paying job doing the same thing.

this is a great place to work, great benefits and everything and we still have trouble keeping workers.

Click to expand...

Perhaps pay more? I understand that it's frustrating to train people only to have them quit, but if the market pays more, then either meet what the market offers or people will leave.

James Mcquade said:

this is my opinion as I see it.

Most of today's kids are lazy and do not want to work.
they want the $30/hr. job and play on their cell phones and do little work.

Click to expand...

I see it the same way.... but I also heard the same thing from our parents and im sure our grandparents said the same about them, to me it does seem like the younger working crowd wants to get paid for playing video games and a free education and they want to live in their parents basement and get paid 100k a year for doing nothing... its ok to dream but you need to get your *** out of bed and work for it

I do not see things getting better for some time... I hope, but I dont see it.