ADAPT TO CHANGING NEEDS THROUGH RESPONSIVE UPSKILLING

By Bill Berrien - CEO of Pindel Global Precision

Long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, the Milwaukee Region had a tremendous opportunity to grow in advanced manufacturing – if we could find a way to cultivate the skilled workforce we’d need to support it.

That need has only increased since the pandemic hit us. Supply chains are being disrupted. OEMs are considering other sourcing opportunities. There’s an awareness and an increased need for very quick production, on-demand production, shorter lead times and lower minimum work quantities. To grow, our companies need to become even more agile. That means our employees do, too. We must be able to pivot, developing additional skills to move in new directions and spreading existing skills more broadly throughout our teams.

But we can’t expect our current employees to go to school full-time for this. For the Milwaukee Region to thrive, we have to take an innovative and collaborative approach to reskilling and upskilling. We have to think differently.

The Milwaukee Region is fortunate to have a well-developed system of higher education institutions and technical colleges. But their model is being disrupted, too, and we must take a hard look at their delivery models. Today, technical colleges determine curriculum, hire instructors, purchase training tools and provide facilities – a comprehensive, vertically integrated approach, but one that can be sluggish in responding to industry needs and isn’t the best model for individuals who aren’t in position to take on full-time school and student loans.

Within the MMAC and M7, we’re proposing a different model, one Tim Sheehy eloquently coined The Milwaukee Model: industry determines what skills need to be trained, industry pays for the training and it is provided at scale in a manner conducive to the needs of companies and their current workforce.

Let’s say a group of companies want to develop a curriculum around quality measurement tools (metrology.) Working with a technical college, the companies would develop a curriculum that can lead to a credential approved by the technical college. One company in the program could share training tools. Another could provide learning space. Instructors could be experts from another company in the program. Employees train for a half-day five days a week for eight weeks to earn a credential and increase their value. Each supplier would receive a portion of the per-student fee that employers pay. Ideally, these credentials could, over time, accumulate to earn a degree.

We tell our team that automation is not your enemy. If you can program it, if you can repair it, if you can troubleshoot it, that’s your ticket to a higher wage.

When our current employees increase their skills and move up the ladder, it makes room on the lower rungs and creates an entry point for others: People who are on the sidelines of the workforce because COVID-19 accelerated disruption to the industries they were working, as well as people re-entering the workforce from prison and from stay-at-home roles. Bring them in -- and show them the same path to advancement and higher wages.

We’ve got this awesome manufacturing ecosystem that goes back 100 years, back to the days when Milwaukee was the machine shop to the world. We have an amazing and highly skilled workforce -- but we need to grow it and we need new thinking to do so. If we do this right, and layer in more automation and artificial intelligence, I believe we can be the manufacturing floor to the world. But we’ve got to get on it.