Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1319500
22 PCB007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2020 fabrication. The idea started to emerge that to find the right aptitudes, we need to make the case that electronics manufacturing is an at- tractive place to work. GreenSource Fabrication, based in Charles- ton, New Hampshire, also works with univer- sities to recruit talent. In the November 2020 issue of PCB007 Magazine, Alex Stepinski, vice president and architect of the zero-waste fa- cility, shared the following in our interview with him: Matties: One of the big concerns is there's not a stream of young engineers coming in with the mindset that you have. What should the in- dustry do to help resolve that? Because we're going to need them, even with all this great equipment. S te p i n s k i : I don't have a solution for t h e i n d u s t r y. A l l I have is our case study, which is data- driven, and we know students coming out of school in the U.S. have a long lead time to get them to func- tion at the level that we need. In Poland, it's a little bit easier, but we don't have a fac- tory in Poland for PCBs; we have a factory for equipment. It seems to work out well. We're trying to leverage that as best we can and partner with schools in the local area. Whel- en made a donation of an advanced manufac- turing facility to the University of New Hamp- shire a few years ago in the name of our for- mer CEO. We had a lot of young grads out of the Uni- versity of New Hampshire and Keene State. We have a few other schools in the area; again, we're constantly partnering with them to move things forward. We even have a 'little league' of manufacturing. We have school buses local- ly come in, and kids are learning about manu- facturing. We're doing a lot, but it's still quite challenging. Matties: You keyed in on it. The appeal of man- ufacturing isn't there compared to technology companies. Stepinski: We're a service economy now, so it's quite a challenge. There's something telling in Stepinski's com- ments. For more specialized talent, he looks overseas in the short term. In the U.S., he's playing the long game to make manufactur- ing attractive by promoting manufacturing to students as early as high school. It's not hard to imagine that HR departments feel the challenge. We get that sense from Sunstone's Kuretich, as well as IPS's Brask. What's an HR director to do? In February 2019, we printed a two-part in- terview with Terry McNabb, a technical recruit- er from MRI Network. In this interview, which ran in both SMT007 Magazine and PCB007 Magazine, McNabb explored how a recruiting specialist can help cast a wider net and find the strongest candidates: McNabb: Companies a re f a c e d w i t h a quandary. One is that they have a succes- sion crisis. They have to find a way to de- velop the future lead- ership of the com- pany, and they can't wait on millennials. But at the same time, the average tenure keeps dropping. So, if I'm convinced that you'll be in the C-suite five years from now, you might well be three companies down your career by then. The bigger trend that we see is people are hiring more for a specific need. I might not be able to keep you for several years, but you can solve this million-dollar problem, so even if you only stay for a year, I'm in good shape. It's also a huge trend among millenni- als to not be hired at all but instead, appear on a contract basis. Alex Stepinski Terry McNabb