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28 The PCB Magazine • May 2017 Goldman: It's easy to make statements. Much eas- ier said than done. Ryder: I would absolutely agree. Goldman: I think all of us in manufacturing have taken that with a grain of salt. Ryder: You have to, because I don't think he re- ally understands, which is too bad. Goldman: But at the same time, we have to say, "Well, what can we do?" Ryder: That's true. I would look to the IPC to be working on that side of things. Goldman: That's interesting because IPC has ed- ucation as one of its four aspirational goals. The program is called IPC EDGE and there are train- ing webinars available to members. I've been com- menting to John Mitchell because all the courses listed are related to assembly. He gave me a man- date, "Find out what the board shops need. What can we put in there for the board shops?" I'll make that a challenge to you. If they were to put in train- ing programs for printed circuit board facilities, what would you want to see? Ryder: First, I absolutely support that idea. You could do basically all the functions that way. That would improve the person's chance of making more money and making it a real career versus a job. It's just like getting certified to be a designer or an assembler or a solderer, whatever it may be, we don't have any of that going on for the fabrication side. There are no programs that I'm aware of. I would say about 20+ years ago, we used to bring a group of people down, typically supervi- sors from our Redmond facility to take some of the classes at the IPC show. This was back in the days probably around the time it was in Long Beach for a year or two, and then, all the sud- den, those classes went away for the fabrication side. They just didn't exist anymore. I'm sure it was poor attendance or lack of interest or what- ever, but that was the only thing that was out there for us. Goldman: I know that many years ago, IPC had a line of training videos on PCB manufacturing. Ryder: I worked for a company that purchased a whole bunch of those videos. They were terrible. Goldman: They were probably outdated, right? Ryder: That was the case. I believe it was looking at how to feed boards into an etcher and then take them off the other end. That was about the depth. It didn't talk about break points, pH, the temperature issues, etc. It didn't address any of the real science that's going on inside that ma- chine. It's just how you feed a conveyor and take it out the other end. Goldman: You want your operators to know a lit- tle bit more. Ryder: Oh, they have to. Otherwise, you'd be producing scrap all day long and not even know it. There has to be serious training in there. Goldman: An interesting part of this, then, is what do you want your operators to know? You want DAVE RYDER ON PROTOTRON CIRCUITS' STRATEGY FOR HIRING IN TODAY'S MARKETPLACE Dave Ryder