Skills gap or training gap?

In June, I visited Peerless Precision Inc., a machine shop in Westfield, Mass., outside of Springfield, which makes miniature parts for the aerospace industry, among other customers. On the shop tour, I saw something I hadn’t seen in a while—several young machinists working independently on various projects. I asked Kristin Maier, president of the shop, how she had been able to hire young machinists, a rarity in

This is an interesting counterpoint to what machine shop managers in other regions are experiencing. They claim to struggle mightily to fill open positions, adding that the candidates they do get often don’t have the requisite skills. The example of Springfield-area shops suggests that having the right training and development infrastructure in place is a key part of the process—infrastructure that has often been neglected in other areas. Indeed, because manufacturing employment has dropped, sometimes dramatically, in recent years, many machine shop programs suffer from poor enrollment and lack of funding or have disappeared entirely.

“The U.S. lags behind many rivals such as Germany, Japan and [South] Korea both in the scores of high school students on standardized tests and in providing apprenticeship and training programs,” wrote Neil Munshi in his article, “Employers’ skills gap claim does not show up in US wage data,” posted on the Financial Times Web site. Active apprenticeship programs fell from about 32,000 in 2002 to fewer than 20,000 in 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

“Critics charge that manufacturers that have spent 25 years cutting jobs, eliminating training, using temporary workers and offshoring cannot now blame the workforce’s lack of skills,” Munshi wrote.

Toni Gilpin, a labor historian, was quoted in the article saying manufacturers want “highly trained workers at cut-rate prices and they’re willing to wait until they can get that rather than absorb any training costs themselves.”