Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1464867
APRIL 2022 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 13 Feinberg: Which means instead of having some- one drop out of the program in the educational track, you are oen hiring them, paying them a wage, and funding their training, just to find out they just don't have the aptitude. Hernandez: You may, and that's unfortunately one of the challenges that the industry runs into. ese are not training organizations that are hiring people. ese are EMS companies, fabricators, and OEMs; they are here to man- ufacture electronics. eir core competency is not education. ey may hire some trainers to be part of their organization, but that's not their core competency. ere should not be an expectation that they're going to have the knowledge, or the wherewithal, to develop well-defined training programs. What you typically see in the industry is a hybrid approach to training: "We're going to teach you how we do things internally, and you're going to shadow some people and learn from them. You're going to pick up a little bit of skill here, and a little bit of skill there." But what ends up happening is that they're training for months on end. ey're picking up this skill little by little, and it could be six months down the line before you realize that this guy's never going to get it, because you've never actu- ally put him in a formal training program. You never put him into something that will mea- sure his ability to comprehend, understand, internalize this information, and retain it. For example, I'm great with my hands, but I can't do any car work. I could go on YouTube, figure out how to do some automotive work, and brute force my way through it. But if I did that every time something broke in my car, imagine how long it would take me to do it. Feinberg: Or how long the car would last. Hernandez: But put me in a formalized train- ing program to learn these things in a period of weeks or days. At the end, I'm going to be pipeline is not filling this particular gap. We have a fundamental lack of a pipeline feeding talent, and this exacerbates all our other prob- lems. Johnson: at is an interesting point because it means that basically the training starts not at the educational level, but at the new hire. Hernandez: Exactly. For many organizations, that's absolutely true. We recently built a pro- gram that I never thought we would have to build: an entry-level engineering training pro- gram. We created this because the industry kept telling us that they're hiring talented engi- neers, from the top engineering programs in the nation, who have no knowledge of PCBs. Unfortunately, that's happening more and more. Johnson: We established that upskilling starts at the new hire. Basically, at any point when you're hiring somebody at a technical level, there is an immediate need to be upskilling that person. What are the best practices for getting started? Hernandez: It's a great question. As a side note here, we don't even refer to that as upskilling yet. We refer to that as "onboarding" or "level- setting." Your immediate goal is not optimi- zation, but rather to have this person you just hired reach a full level of productivity as quickly as possible. Feinberg: Integration, yes. Hernandez: Exactly. You are trying to get this new person in your organization to be able to contribute with the minimal amount of outlay of cost and time, because the more time that they spend training, the less time they're able to produce for you. So, because there's not a well-established pipeline feeding already pre- trained talent to you, these organizations are having to take on that training themselves.