garyhlucas
Stainless
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2013
- Location
- New Jersey
Years ago I ran an electrical contracting business and casually mentioned to someone that 60% of my 18 employees were functionally iliterate. They were shocked I could say something like that about employees but I wS being truthful. Every day I would read their timesheets and knew which ones could read or write.
I bring this up because I was talking to a guy I worked with at my last job, and he mentions that the company has given the task of checking in materials for complex manufacturing to a young guy that is the owners cousin. They were trying to help him out, he'd been a troubled youth in school, had been in jail and couldn't find a job. He was questioning how this guy could do the job as he clearly had no idea what any of the parts were. Then he mentions the guy is always asking questions about the parts, and pointing them out on packing slips.
Alarm bells went off when he said this! I said to him, I think the problem is bigger than you realize. He likely can't read! When he points to an item on the packing list and you tell hom what it is he is hiding the fact he can't read, and gets by with pattern matching. I related to him an experience with a guy loading a truck and filling it with the wrong stuff when the words on the boxes changed from 'green' to 'black' and he never noticed.
I mentioned this to our shop manager who worked in a machine shop who said they had a guy who would point to a note on a drawing and say "what do you think about that?" as if he wanted an opinion. Turns out he couldn't read the note!
So does machining suffer from a lack of good candidates because our schools encourage those at the bottom to seek jobs like electrician, plumber, carpenter, and machinist in the mistaken belief these jobs don't require high levels of intelligence? One time I hired a guy with a college degree as an electrician and he was an eagle soaring amongst the turkeys! In fact as a foreman in a union shop he was eventually making about $180K.
I bring this up because I was talking to a guy I worked with at my last job, and he mentions that the company has given the task of checking in materials for complex manufacturing to a young guy that is the owners cousin. They were trying to help him out, he'd been a troubled youth in school, had been in jail and couldn't find a job. He was questioning how this guy could do the job as he clearly had no idea what any of the parts were. Then he mentions the guy is always asking questions about the parts, and pointing them out on packing slips.
Alarm bells went off when he said this! I said to him, I think the problem is bigger than you realize. He likely can't read! When he points to an item on the packing list and you tell hom what it is he is hiding the fact he can't read, and gets by with pattern matching. I related to him an experience with a guy loading a truck and filling it with the wrong stuff when the words on the boxes changed from 'green' to 'black' and he never noticed.
I mentioned this to our shop manager who worked in a machine shop who said they had a guy who would point to a note on a drawing and say "what do you think about that?" as if he wanted an opinion. Turns out he couldn't read the note!
So does machining suffer from a lack of good candidates because our schools encourage those at the bottom to seek jobs like electrician, plumber, carpenter, and machinist in the mistaken belief these jobs don't require high levels of intelligence? One time I hired a guy with a college degree as an electrician and he was an eagle soaring amongst the turkeys! In fact as a foreman in a union shop he was eventually making about $180K.