TRACI TAPANI is not your usual C.E.O. For the last 19 years, she and her sister have been co-presidents of Wyoming Machine, a sheet metal company they inherited from their father in Stacy, Minn. I met Tapani at a meeting convened by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development to discuss one of its biggest challenges today: finding the skilled workers that employers need to run local businesses. I'll let Tapani take it from here:
"About 2009," she explained, "when the economy was collapsing and there was a lot of unemployment, we were working with a company that got a contract to armor Humvees," so her 55-person company "had to hire a lot of people. I was in the market looking for 10 welders. I had lots and lots of applicants, but they did not have enough skill to meet the standard for armoring Humvees. Many years ago, people learned to weld in a high school shop class or in a family business or farm, and they came up through the ranks and capped out at a certain skill level. They did not know the science behind welding," so could not meet the new standards of the U.S. military and aerospace industry.
"They could make beautiful welds," she said, "but they did not understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques" and how different metals and gases, pressures and temperatures had to be combined. Moreover, in small manufacturing businesses like hers, explained Tapani, "unlike a Chinese firm that does high-volume, low-tech jobs, we do a lot of low-volume, high-tech jobs, and each one has its own design drawings. So a welder has to be able to read and understand five different design drawings in a single day."
Tapani eventually found a welder from another firm who had passed the American Welding Society Certified Welding Inspector exam, the industry's gold standard, and he trained her welders — some of whom took several tries to pass the exam — so she could finish the job. Since then, Tapani trained a woman from Stacy, who had originally learned welding to make ends meet as a single mom. She took on the challenge of becoming a certified welding inspector, passed the exam and Tapani made her the company's own in-house instructor, no longer relying on the local schools.
"She knows how to read a weld code. She can write work instructions and make sure that the people on the floor can weld to that instruction," so "we solved the problem by training our own people," said Tapani, adding that while schools are trying hard, training your own workers is often the only way for many employers to adapt to "the quick response time" demanded for "changing skills." But even getting the right raw recruits is not easy. Welding "is a $20-an-hour job with health care, paid vacations and full benefits," said Tapani, but "you have to have science and math. I can't think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it's bent to a certain angle."
Who knew? Welding is now a STEM job — that is, a job that requires knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math.
Employers across America will tell you similar stories. It's one reason we have three million open jobs around the country but 8 percent unemployment. We're in the midst of a perfect storm: a Great Recession that has caused a sharp increase in unemployment and a Great Inflection — a merger of the information technology revolution and globalization that is simultaneously wiping out many decent-wage, middle-skilled jobs, which were the foundation of our middle class, and replacing them with decent-wage, high-skilled jobs. Every decent-paying job today takes more skill and more education, but too many Americans aren't ready. This problem awaits us after the "fiscal cliff."
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