IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527867
IPC COMMUNITY 14 FALL 2024 and begins their work. Most training courses are self-paced, so we allow employees to do the training in our facility or at home. Most people take an hour or two of their workday and get paid for onsite training. How do you plan to implement your apprenticeship program? We put our first cohort through the apprentice- ship program this summer with three employees from our day shift and two from our night shift. There are some great facets to this program. First, we identified mentors on our shop floor to assist the apprentices. That gives our highly ten- ured, highly skilled employees the opportunity to grow as well as the individuals in training. Have you noticed any reduction in scrap, rework, and repair based on your investment in training? Yes, but in a slightly different way. About 50% of our revenue is in quick turns and prototypes, so we do a lot of touch-ups as we're running pro- totypes throughout the shop. Nothing is a given when you put a prototype on the SMT line, and we have seen a dramatic increase in our customer requests for rework as a service. So, we sent sev- eral employees through training for IPC-7711, the rework standard, and that was really powerful. Let's say you have an aerospace or defense product, are building five or less, and the design is still new. Inevitably, some things won't work as designed and will need to be hand-soldered. Having people in-house who can do that cor- rectly at a very high level is a great service that our customers find highly valuable. What has been the biggest benefit of having a mentorship program? How does it benefit long-term as well as new employees? We can put new hires through entry-level training with the workforce subscription or with the apprenticeship program, and maintain the bandwidth for our higher-skilled employees to do their jobs, as well as mentor. It's really pow- erful.