AFE May/June 2012 : Page 10////////////////////// COVER STORY Joel Leonard and attendees of a Maintenance Crisis Workshop last May in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The attendees pictured, from the semiconduc-tor, plastics, automotive, food and healthcare industries in Southeast Asia, took the CPMM exam during the workshop. Photo courtesy of AFE. “It All Begins at Home” But according to Cowley, it is not just companies that take a short-term ap-proach — the culture we live in makes it diffi cult to raise young people who are willing to work in the building trades. “Everyone wants the easy fi x,” Cowley said. “It can be painful to do things the right way. You have to work at it to get things right, and parents aren’t willing to take the time to teach their children that,” he added. “For example, I have a friend who told me he was tired from having to mow his lawn that day. His son is 14 or 15 years old, so I asked him, ‘Why can’t your son mow the lawn?’ His reply was that his son never did it the way he liked or wanted it to be done. But I wasn’t talking about how to get the lawn cut — I was talking about teaching his son the importance of manual work like mowing the lawn,” he added. “If we don’t teach kids the importance of this type of work, we will continue to have too many workers in cubicles and not enough of them working in the skilled trades. It all begins at home.” Cowley also believes that parents should think about other options for their children besides college. “Parents insist that their children go to col-lege,” he said. “It’s as though parents think they’re doing some kind of harm to their kids if they don’t shell out a couple of hundred thousand dollars for their kids’ college education. But large companies like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Disney have fantastic training pro-grams that are free. And the average en-gineering degree from a lesser-known school like Old Dominion is great, unless you’re designing space shuttles. Th e education itself is not nearly as important as what you do aft er you get the education.” “We Don’t Have a Maintenance Crisis” Dennis M. (Denny) Hydrick, CFM, CPMM, facilities operations manager at Lockheed Martin IS&GS-ENS in King of Prussia, Pa., said he is aware of the maintenance crisis in the United States, but it hasn’t affected his town, a half-hour drive from Philadelphia, as much as other parts of the country. “We don’t have a shortage of skilled labor around here,” Hydrick said. “Pennsylvania is still pretty much a blue-collar state.” He continued, “That may not be true in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, but for the places in between, we don’t automatically push kids to go into college. We give them a choice of whether they want to go to college or to do something differ-ent, like work in the building trades.” He added, “As a result, I never had a real problem getting what I would call ‘semi-skilled’ workers who have the knowledge and motivation to be trained in a skill. Also, it never hurts to work for a company that everyone wants to join.” Hydrick said he is able to recruit workers who have at least a basic knowledge of electricity, HVAC and plumbing. “Some of them have even more than a basic knowledge of those areas. I like to say that most of them are semi-skilled in those areas, and from there Lockheed takes them and trains them until they become skilled,” he said. What type of training does it take to go from semi-skilled to skilled at Lockheed Martin? “Th e majority of our 10 May | June 2012 ■ Facilities Engineering Journal ■ www.AFE.org Publication List Using a screen reader? Click Here |
