It’s been a week of high-profile “state of” speeches, but while people of goodwill can disagree about the state of the nation and Wisconsin, there is no question the state of Wisconsin’s manufacturing industry is strong, according to Buckley Brinkman, executive director of the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
Now if the state’s elected and appointed officials can work with industry to help change its outdated “dumb, dirty, and dangerous” image, Brinkman said the future will look even brighter.
For an important industry sector that led the way in Wisconsin job creation last year, producing 9,300 new jobs here, old imagery still is hard to shed. Having worked in a paper mill early in his work life, Brinkman knows that manufacturing is not most parents’ first choice of career for their children.
“In my household, when I was choosing a career 30 years ago, if I had come home and told my mom that I wanted to be a welder when I grew up, she would have said, ‘I love you very much son, but I’m not sure where you’re sleeping tonight because you can’t live here anymore,’” he stated, only half joking.
In today’s reality, he said, manufacturing is smart, safe, sustainable, and surging. “If you go into the manufacturers who are making their move right now, there is computerization and there is a clean environment,” he noted. “It’s not anything like the paper mill where I first cut my teeth.”
Bucking up manufacturing
Ask any business consultant what relocation-minded manufacturers are looking for in a new locale, and the first thing he or she would cite is logistical proximity to market. The second item on the wish list is workforce availability, and the consultant might not be totally certain that workforce quality hasn’t risen to number one.
Brinkman has attended recent meetings between Walker administration officials and state manufacturers to address their workforce development and training needs. What manufacturers need – CNC operators, welders, and people with general production skills – is easy enough to identify. But identifying people to fill those roles is more complicated.
“One of the issues we have is that it’s such a complex problem, and it’s really a matrix problem rather than a linear problem,” Brinkman said. “I was talking to someone this week who was examining at this issue, and he said, ‘I’ve been looking at this for four months and I can describe it pretty well, but I have no great solutions for it.’ I think that sums up the situation we have.”
The Walker administration has put forth initiatives like Wisconsin Working, which includes a Workforce Readiness Council; it is attempting to marry the state’s unemployment insurance program with the Wisconsin JobCenter website; and it recently announced a new education reform initiative. Those policy thrusts will piggyback local and regional efforts such as:
- Milwaukee Hire, which is identifying and pre-certifying workers who have the skills and the aptitude to fill jobs.
- Second Chance Partners for Education, where at-risk high school sophomores are placed on a vocational career track and obtain marketable skills by the time they complete high school. The program is available in pockets of the state, including Milwaukee and a new initiative in Green Bay.
- The Gold Collar program in northwest Wisconsin, and the All-Star Program in the New North, both of which are designed to raise the visibility of manufacturing careers for high school students.
Asked why more public dollars are not distributed directly to individual companies so that they can train people, Brinkman cited poor economies of scale. “Some things are best done at a technical college or in more general education settings,” he said. “The issue is not just training workers. It’s identifying them and getting them into the system.”
One of the things that will become clear to young people who pursue a manufacturing career is the impact of three decades’ worth of safety consciousness and work to make manufacturing jobs competitive in the global market.
“We can still get you hot, dirty, and sweaty if you really want to, but by and large the jobs that are going wanting right now are jobs that require a little welding, and that can put together a whole portfolio of skills on the manufacturing floor,” Brinkman said. “If you’re in one of these leading manufacturers right now, it’s a piece of technical skill, it’s the ability to solve problems, and then to work with teammates in coming up with the best solution. The best manufacturers involve their employees with their customers, so there has to be some ability to interact with the final customer.”
Since the problem is complex, Brinkman sees a race to a solution between Wisconsin and other states that are wrestling with the same issue. “For the long haul, if we have all these initiatives going, we’re talking five to 10 years before we turn the ship,” he said. “This isn’t anything that’s going to happen in the next six months. We’ve spent the last 30 years aiming our system at a knowledge and technology economy. What we’re finding out now is that we really do need to make something.”
Degrees of difference
A few years ago, there was concern that not enough Wisconsin high school graduates were chasing bachelor’s degrees, which was followed by a push toward those four-year degrees. Brinkman is concerned that there is too much emphasis on college, stating that kids are smart enough to know whether they are cut out for it.
The president of the University of Wisconsin System might take issue with Brinkman, but he said a young professional with $100,000 in debt and a $35,000-a-year job to pay it off is hardly in an enviable position. “That equation doesn’t quite work,” he stated. “The fact of the matter is that 70% of the jobs in the state require a two-year degree or less. So we keep measuring our schools on college placement and SAT scores, and pushing people towards college, and in the meantime we have a lot of jobs that can make a great career for someone.”
Not only is the Wisconsin manufacturing industry faring well in a sluggish economy, its impressive ability to export – industrial and electrical machinery are the state’s top two export categories – bodes well for the future. The strength of those categories is likely to push total 2011 exports above the $20 billion mark, where it stood as recently as 2008.
“This workforce issue is one of they key issues facing our state right now,” Brinkman added. “It’s a serious problem, but anytime you have a serious problem, you have a major opportunity, too. We have such a strong manufacturing base in the state, with 23% of the nonfarm workforce engaged in manufacturing, that we’re in a great position to bring some resources to bear and really have it leveraged throughout our economy.
“Not only that, but when I talk to my counterparts in other states, they are facing the same issue. So the state that finds the secret sauce first, wins.”
Read related full article from the Green Bay Press Gazette: Walker pushes manufacturing at Ashwaubenon stop
