Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1319500
DECEMBER 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 21 boards, that's great; we have been fortunate in that regard and gotten a lot of great referrals and excellent hires. It has been interesting in the mechanical operations department. A couple of our new- est hires were CNC operators, and rather than targeting just the PCB industry, we looked for some of the specific skill sets that may not nec- essarily be specifically PCB-related. Johnson: How is that working out? Kuretich: Very well. We had two new in- dividuals start in our mechanical opera- tions area that had finished up a CNC course at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City and sought us out. There was a referral by an employee, who sent them our way, and we felt good about it. They had the aptitude and passed the certifications. It's good to see that the local community col- leges have those types of programs available; it's not all white-collar education. The students are ready to join the workforce, and they turn out to be great employees too. It's pretty ex- citing that the college is right in our backyard. Viter: I'm on an advi- sory board there now to help reshape the curriculum for the electronics classes. I attended one meeting recently, and I'll at- tend another one soon to review the revised offerings. They (Clack- amas Community Col- lege) are very interest- ed in tailoring the classes to be relevant to to- day's electronics industry needs and are seek- ing input from the local businesses that would benefit from well-trained new hires. Connecting with a local community col- lege seems to be a common strategy. Sun- stone's work with Clackamas Community Col- lege echoes the experiences shared in the in- terview, published in the December 2020 issue of SMT007 Magazine, with Johnny Vanderford and Courtney Tenhover at Lorain County Com- munity College in Ohio. We asked Vanderford and Tenhover about the job market in their im- mediate vicinity: Vanderford: LCCC is located in Elyria, Ohio. Around 90% of these companies [we work with] are with- in a 40-mile radi- us around the center of Cleveland. We've had companies in the surrounding area, in- cluding as far as In- diana and Pennsylva- nia, that need a similar skill set. If students were interested in moving to another place, they would have careers there as well. We tell the students the same thing. It's nice to have opportunities and options available for you. Tenhover: Predomi- nantly, students land assembler, hand sol- dering, electrome- chanical, and SMT operator, technician, and engineering po- sitions as they near more of the end of their bachelor's de- gree. Those are the most common titles. Some are hired as electrical interns, and oth- er smaller employers just don't have a job de- scription with the title, so they hire them in and use them in a wide range of areas. Kuretich and Viter also are working through the question of how to entice a candidate from another industry to jump over to printed circuit Sheri Kuretich Nancy Viter Johnny Vanderford Courtney Tenhover