The Jobs Are There, But the Employees Are Not

Just last night I was fortunate enough to share a quick dinner with a stunning young woman. I
met her at a nice restaurant before a convention she was attending inside of the very same building.
Eventually, one of her colleagues approached our table and we struck up a conversation that eventually
led to him uttering the words, It's not that we don't have jobs, it's that we don't have the employees.
It wasn't until early the next morning on my drive to work that I found out how true these words rang
out. He was talking about the exportation of American jobs to other countries as a direct result of our
lack of a properly skilled and trained workforce. Normally, this would probably slide under the radar
as everyone around simply nodded their heads in agreement. However, he said this very simple phrase
to someone planted firmly within that working class. The more I thought about it, the more I came to
realize that he was describing the effect of what I have seen over the last 10 years of my career.
To continue further, I will have to lend to you some background information on myself. I am
currently working as a CNC programmer and shop supervisor in a small company that creates robotic
automation equipment for the industrial market. This means anything from automatic screw drivers to
large scale automotive manufacturers and everything in between. Looking into the past, my path
appears random, almost chaotic. Like most my age, I was imprinted with the ideal that college is the
first step to a successful career and a happy life. My grades throughout high school gave me the
opportunity to attend virtually any university or school of my choosing. Despite being awarded a full
scholarship to a smaller school, I chose to attend Purdue University and rack up an out-of-state tuition
debt in pursuit of a computer engineering degree. Let's call this mistake number one. Fast forward to
my third year in the program and to my realization that I hated absolutely everything about what I
striving to do when I graduated. My grades plummeted and I quit to head home and re-evaluate my
future. Shortly after arriving back home, I started working as a machinist in a large scale machine shop
in the area. I had worked in a machine shop every summer growing up doing odd jobs. A grueling 60
hour minimum work week on the night shift for abysmal pay was a huge wake-up call. My mother
helped me to set aside money week after week as a plan for me to return to school. I had their full
support, as always. After two years, I returned to Purdue to try my hand at something else. I had
found something I enjoyed immensely in Computer Graphics. I was headed in the direction to design
three-dimensional character models for everything requiring CGI in the realms of television, film, and
video games. Upon leaving college I quickly realized that I had done zero job market research and that
the jobs just weren't there. They required picking up and moving to other areas of the country to work
as an unpaid intern or freelancer. Needless to say, I did not have the financial freedom to do this and
support myself. I went back to the machining world and realized that the two years of experience
meant something to a few of the companies in the area. I was given the opportunity to work as a CNC
lathe operator. The money was still terrible, but I was teaching myself to program and inadvertently
making myself more appealing these employers. During this time period I was still under the delusion
that I needed to do something that required a college degree. My college loans kicked into gear and I
was unable to save the money to make that big life jump to the west coast like I had planned.
Completely shattered and feeling like a complete failure based on my past projections of what I should
be doing and where I should be, I took to depression and drinking. Eventually I was coaxed by my
employer into an apprenticeship program at a local community college, less than eager and going along
with it merely to keep my job. I didn't see this as any sort of means to an end and quit my job and the
program a semester later. I ended up in another local machine shop with more freedom from an
assembly line type of position. Here I would be required to learn to do more things with a greater
variety of machinery. I worked alongside an older gentleman who had gone through his journeyman
program, like many other his age, decades prior. I was constantly messing things up and doing things
wrong with little guidance. Finally, one day I asked the older man to show me how he would go about

making something I was tasked to do. He walked me through step by step. After that I asked him to
show me the next 20 or so tasks after that. Finally, I started to do a wide variety of things on my own
and would come to him at the end to see if it was what he would do. If it wasn't, I would ask him to
explain and I would change it accordingly. Over the course of a year or so I had soaked up as much of
this man's 40 years of knowledge as I could. I had unknowingly diversified myself with what I was
skilled enough to do. All of this was to avoid be yelled at for making mistakes, mind you. Though I
had learned all of these skills I was still sullen on my position in life and the direction I was headed.
Then one day I decided I would teach myself how to program more complex machining practices. I
had no idea that the job market for this was so vast with very few employees out there with the skill to
fill that void. I found out that my observations all along were true for most of my profession as a
whole.
The average age of the skilled labor workforce at any company I had worked was 40 or older.
Anyone with any skill-set worth mentioning was nearing retirement age. This average age keeps
increasing, while those with the skills and capability not needing to keep up with current day industry
technologies. What this has done is to create a void of any younger individuals with the skills to fill the
positions being reopened by the retiring veterans of the trade. When I applied for a new job with my
newfound skill-set, I found that I was 10 to 15 years younger than anyone near my skill-set, and more
knowledgeable than them. I was hired 5 minutes into the first and only interview and outright given all
salary and beneficial demands that I had immediately. However, This trend, while good for those like
myself, is creating problems in the industrial manufacturing world. What I found was that salaries for
those skilled positions are skyrocketing. Companies are competing for the very few people out there
with a skill-set that is not pursued anymore. While this sounds like a good thing, it creates other
problems as a direct result. Paying these highly skilled individuals incredibly higher salaries than they
would have made in decades past means creating a monumental disparity between the salaries of the
lesser skilled employees and those at the top of the ladder. This is due to the simple fact that these
companies' operating costs increase unless they remove money from another place. The first and only
place hit has seemingly been the low-skill entry level jobs across the entirety of the industry. These
entry level jobs are those that I took on early into my career. I did not see it as an obvious career choice
with any potential for growth, so why should these individuals? What I've found is that these positions
are primarily filled through staffing agencies presenting these low paying jobs to workers with very
few skills. These individuals, much like my former self, seem much more likely to suffer from
substance abuse issues, poor job performance, and attendance. My hypothesis is that this stems from a
depression created by a job where only one skill is taught and repeated daily for very little
compensation, with very little opportunity for advancement. This translates to issues with production.
An example of this in the real world is as follows. Let's say that I am tasked with creating a
new prototype to speed up processes on an automotive assembly line. This piece of machinery I create
requires extremely exacting components and high attention to detail. I finish this project and present
this to the automotive producer with a test run. After seeing my prototype in action, it's estimated that
it will cut production times for this specific piece of the assembly process by 5 minutes per automobile,
translating into millions of dollars of profit gain. Faster production equates to more cars produced and
higher profits. As a result the manufacturer requests 25 of these prototype machines to put into
production immediately. That sounds simple enough right? However, I cannot make every single part
to these machines like I did with the prototype and we simply do not have the manpower to produce
these cars. We are forced to either hire more employees from a staffing agency or outsource the
machining of these parts to other companies, effectively reducing a profits by a rather large margin.
We are also at a higher risk when outsourcing of these parts being completed by low skilled individuals
with no motivation to hold a high standard of quality. In either scenario, one of these low skilled

employees is likely manufacturing the pieces to these machines that are set to go into a mass
production assembly line. In this scenario, our employee is Alcoholic Andy. He has a low paying,
monotonous manufacturing job, with little prospect for advancement wherein he presses a few buttons
and does the same thing all day. Andy drinks every night and sometimes comes in hungover, late, or
does not show up at all. He does not have the trouble shooting skills of his higher paid counterpart.
Andy has little reason to take any sort of pride in his work and some of these pieces are shipped and
leaked through the assembly process. This should not happen, but in the real world it happens all of the
time. After 20 days of run time on the line, the fantastic machines that were developed and
implemented as integral process of our client's automotive production fail. The line is pulled to a
sudden halt and production stops immediately. Millions of dollars are lost as a result of Andy's lack of
pride in his job. Another scenario is that these parts are improperly assembled, but make it through the
line. Production halts here as well and damage control initiates to recall of the cars that made it
through the assembly process due to this oversight. However, the damage doesn't stop there. In a
publicly traded company, stock prices plummet as a result and millions of shareholders take a hit. I
liken this to the butterfly effect of the industrial world and professional worlds and how they interact
with one another.
Now, while these scenarios may seem far fetched, they happen every year. With this being such
a frequent occurrence, many manufacturers have lost their businesses altogether. The problem with
these situations is not with our unskilled laborer, Andy, but with our foundation as a whole that has
created the condition of the current industrial job market. We as a country have been instilling this
delusion into our young adults and teenagers that everyone should strive to achieve a college degree
where they will become engineers, accountants, and so forth. What we are left with are droves of
professionals with nobody to make the products that they represent. This has discouraged the
development of the industrial job front that the country was founded on. If this trend continues, we will
continue to drift into an economy where we develop ideas, but no actual products. Instead, we will
continue to outsource these so called jobs to other countries. What I have found personally, is that I
was only unhappy with my position in life because of the delusion that I needed to be one of these
professionals to lead a happy life. That a skilled-labor job was somehow less important, desirable, and
socially frowned upon compared to my peers. This is the root of our problem as a whole. Instead of
urging every young adult down a path that may not suit them best, we need to offer other alternatives.
Vocation colleges exist, but are typically only sought out after those individuals have failed to meet the
expectations of traditional colleges or universities and the professional world. Mike Rowe, the host of
Dirty Jobs, said it best. Of the 3 million available jobs today, less than 20% require a four year
degree. We're lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back so they can educate
themselves for jobs that no longer exist. This is well stated, to say the least.
If you've made it with me this far you're probably saying to yourself that much like our
politicians, I'm merely stating what is wrong without offering any real solution. You would be correct.
I do not have a direct method of action, nor the means to put anything impactful into motion
whatsoever. However, with the start of my latest position I was told that I would be given free reign to
change thing saw fit. My boss had a magic pen that bought whatever I needed, as he succinctly put
it. After my first week at this company I had written a few programs and had already started chopping
down production times. One of the men tasked to run one of these production machines was the saw
operator. He had only been there for about a month and a half and his main duty was to cut large
quantities of steel and aluminum to the correct sizes to correlate to the jobs they were intended for.
While doing this this, they also tasked him to load one of the CNC vertical mills with material and run
my program. After a couple hours some issues with tool wear arose as they usually do. I taught him
some quick basics on it. Another week passes and I've answered a barrage of questions about

machining, as he had little experience but an obvious penchant to learn. This saw operator position to
which I'm referring to is one of the aforementioned low-skill positions staffed with people that I've
been talking about this whole time. It was clear to me that this man had a high level of intellect and a
willingness to learn, but no method of advancement. I made a decision that day and immediately
approached him about my walking him through every job and training him much like the older man
had done for me. I assured him that this something that had the potential to change his life, much like
it did for myself. I cleared this with my superior and started him at the beginning. Fast forward six
months and this man has now been promoted to a CNC machinist, complete with a significant raise and
opportunities for advancement. I am currently teaching him to be a programmer with the hopes that he
will be able to fulfill one of these even higher skill capped roles. While I realize that this is merely one
man with a sea of jobs out there, this shows that it is definitely possible to train these individuals should
we give them the opportunities to do so.
If you braved it through all of this and still haven't grasped why this man I met last night stated
it so perfectly, I will reiterate. The job market in the industrial manufacturing sector is wide open with
very little competition to become successful. This is going to continue in this fashion as more and
more of the skilled-trade workforce is coming into retirement age. Now is the time to show our young
adults that there is more than one way to lead a happy and successful life. I wish I had came to this
realization myself at a much younger age. The jobs are already there, the employees are not.