Shortage of tooling engineers could be hurting US manufacturing

Despite the fact that many manufacturing plants are coming to the United States such as KIA here in Georgia and Mercedes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., much of the highly skilled manufacturing work is not performed here.

The investments in these announcements, according to Ravind Shrotria, DFX and DFM Manager at Coca-Cola, is in items such as equipment that is purchased overseas. The plants indeed create jobs, but are they creating the jobs that the United States should be targeting?

''90 per cent of tooling in these two plants come from Germany or Korea," said Shrotria, who discussed the US tooling engineer shortage at a recent Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute Brown Bag Seminar. "Are we creating a new generation of blue collar workers or very highly skilled manufacturing employees?''

The tooling engineer workforce that was developed in the mid-20th century is hitting retirement age, and the United States has not invested in developing a new crop of these skilled workers. ''We have relied heavily on new technologies to give us the advantage over the competition in terms of tooling, but that has not borne the fruit that we expected,'' said Shrotria.

''Today tool and die shops are shutting down in Pennsylvania and other places because the skill set is not being developed. This lack of training of second generation tooling engineers in the United States is going to hit us hard as other countries build this workforce and we do not.''

Tooling is a very specialised area of manufacturing and mechanical engineering which comprises of the analysis, planning, design, construction, application tools, methods, procedures and techniques, necessary to increase manufacturing productivity in the economy. It requires an apprenticeship period, usually lasting about four years. The investment in that four years is a hindrance for some, but it is an investment that begins to pay off before the training is completed, according to Shrotria. ''By the fourth year, the investment in the student begins to generate returns,'' he added.

After four years, a tooling engineer can expect to make $9 to $21 per hour. ''Some ask if a burger flipper can make $9 an hour, why put in the effort? But those jobs aren't skilled,'' noted Shrotria. ''Tooling is a skilled job and it will lead somewhere.'' If tool design skills are included in the training or picked up later, the pay for these workers increases to $18 to $40-plus per hour.

The reason the United States is falling behind is because the US education system is unfriendly to producing tool designers and tool makers, according to Shrotria.

Unlike its European and Asian counterparts, the United States fails to set up a system that identifies those students more suited for university and the ones more suited for tooling programs.

''If all the money in the world was distributed equally amongst all peoples on this planet, then in the first 1 hour of the equal distribution, there will be some that will have more than 50 times what was given to them,'' explained Shrotria. ''The difference is based on intellect. In the United States, everyone is equal, but in Europe, they identify engineer students that are qualified to move onto university and the ones better suited for another (tooling) program. The United States does not acknowledge this.''

Many of the most successful tooling training programs are propagated by the Europeans throughout the world.

China and other Asian competitors have programs set up to train tooling engineers and the United States continues to fall behind. ''We have realized this a little too late,'' said Shrotria. ''Some say we can import these workers, but importing is not a solution; it is a temporary fix. To grab the edge in manufacturing, we need more specialized tooling engineers versus more engineers overall.''

To do this, Shrotria provided a list of recommendations:

• Students must be identified right out of high school and directed into a tooling program
• Invest in tooling training and apprenticeships because that investment will generate returns by the third for fourth year
• Develop programs to produce credits or bachelor's degree programs after completion
• Invest in research and skill development using federal-private funding
• Offer tax incentives to foreign companies setting up manufacturing plants in the United States for procuring a certain percentage of tooling in the United States

''There must be a strong public private partnership to develop this skill set,'' said Shrotria. ''In Malaysia and Singapore they pay tool makers very well – not only from the company but the government chips in to pay these workers during that four years of training. It is this strong partnership between public and private sectors that brings these programs to life.''