Crisis In Technical Education

Perhaps more important than the technology and tools a company has are its people. People are what make a company truly great and the process of recruiting talented, skilled, dedicated employees and training them properly for success is an important aspect of any company.  The principles of Lean are not just for manufacturing or industrial positions.  They apply equally well to hospital work flow and essentially, any work place where a process flow is needed.  The LeanMan offers several hands-on lean simulation products, such as the most popular Grand Simulation Package to provide students with the knowledge and skills needed when they step into their future world.

Right now, one of the biggest challenges facing manufacturing companies in particular is recruiting millennial talent. There is an outdated mentality that with manufacturing, you do not have autonomy, that it’s challenging work and there’s no opportunity for individualism or advancement. Lean Principles offers employees an opportunity to voice their thoughts and take ownership over their work through continuous improvement and Kaizen methods, by voicing how they think things should or shouldn’t be done. It really gives team members an upper hand honing in on the manufacturing process and making it the best it can be. It’s critical for a company’s future that they can bring in younger talent.  The LeanMan offers the VSM – Value Stream Simulation which includes the Kaizen (voice of the people) approach to process flow improvement.

A challenge facing many manufacturing companies today is finding candidates with the right skill sets to fill specific jobs in supervision and management. There is a real gap of skilled manufacturing talent, largely because many schools have not been teaching manufacturing skills for nearly two decades. About 20 years ago, many high school just stopped teaching manufacturing-related skills. There was no more wood shop, no more automotive, no more welding or electronics classes. Students were convinced that they needed to go to college for advanced degrees and manufacturing was no longer looked at as a long-term career. This all happened around the time of the dotcom boom. The new trend started to shift towards internet and computer-related jobs and teaching.

Today, we find the country with a serious skill gap; in some places, finding job candidates with an underlying concept of how work flows and how the different facets of the value stream all actually work together can present a real challenge. The LeanMan offers the OPT – Optimized Production Technology simulation which fully explores the principles of production such as inventory management, capacity, labor cost and on-time delivery, plus quality and customer satisfaction.

According to the Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, over the next 10 years we will need to fill 3.5 million manufacturing jobs – the current skills gap will result in 2 million of those jobs going unfilled.