A working vacation

Do you have plans for your summer vacation? Do you plan to get another job?

That’s what Larry Clark had in mind. He’s a welding instructor at Moraine Park Technical College, with three locations in Wisconsin’s Fox Valley, and also vice chairman of the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association’s Certified Education Center Council, a collection of vocational educators whose goal is to share best practices related to boosting interest in metal manufacturing careers. He also has a mandate to boost his own professional development outside additional college studies. Clark’s bosses decided it might be good for some of the faculty to spend some time with companies in the private sector.

For Clark, that meant going back to his roots on the shop floor. (He began his work life as a welder in a Milwaukee job shop.) He understands what he needs to impart to his students in the classroom; he just needs to understand what plans employers have for those students as they make the transition into full-time fabricators.

“The companies that do work with us and have for quite a while [on our advisory councils]—there is a lot of back and forth. They want us to cover the fundamentals. Every company is going to have different machines with different software programs and different welding apparatus. The ones that get it really grasp that,” Clark said. “They want us to get them fundamentally sound so that they don’t freak out the first time they hear a press bang over in the corner.”

So far in 2016 Clark has spent time at Maysteel Industries in Allenton, Wis., and Apache Stainless Equipment Corp. in Beaver Dam, Wis. At Maysteel he wasn’t able to work on the shop floor because of company policies, but he did have the chance to job-shadow those in several key roles during his limited stay. At Apache Stainless, he actually did some welding: a GTAW test on stainless pipe the first day and some actual production welding on the last of the five-day stint. (“That felt a little better,” Clark said.) In between, he spent time on the shop floor watching how welders fabricated certain jobs, such as large stainless steel tanks.

Did he get what he needed out of his summer working vacation? You might say that he found some peace of mind because his time on the shop floor this summer reinforced what he remembers from his early days as a welder. When you have a job to do, you need to do it right—the first time. It needs to meet quality specifications, and it needs to meet tolerances. If a part fails to meet either requirement, the fabricator (or assembler, fitter, or welder—all names used by area fabricating companies, according to Clark) needs to have the skills to remedy the situation.

“It reaffirms that we need to stress the little things. We know that the students will need to build something out of metal,” Clark said. “Our program is on the right track. We have been doing that.

“This [work arrangement] reinforces how important that is and for us not to slide,” he added.

It’s been challenging to hold current-day students to those standards, according to Clark. In the years immediately following the Great Recession, many of the students in the welding and fabricating classes were nontraditional students, older people looking to make a career transition. They had the maturity of workers that had been in the workforce and the commitment to learn the basics of welding, as it was to be the foundation for a new career. Today, however, the classes are made of more students fresh out of high school. These students simply haven’t amassed the life experiences and talents that the older students who once occupied their seats did.

“They don’t have the problem-solving skills or don’t have the experience with things like reading a tape measure. They haven’t been exposed to these shop skills,” Clark said. “Now we have to back up a bit. Can we get them to where we have gotten students before by the end of the term? That’s been a little bit of a struggle.”

He and his co-workers aren’t just sitting in the teacher’s lounge bitching about these challenges. They are actively engaged in looking at curriculum changes that might foster more critical thinking and hone problem-solving skills. Educators understand now more than ever how to reach students with different learning styles, and the Moraine Park Technical College educators want to help these students achieve some level of success in the area’s metalworking companies.

Of course, that’s pretty evident. Why else would someone be working during their break?