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Episode #2105
Maintenance Workers Get High Tech & High Pay
Bullock-Brown: When we think of maintenance men we tend to think of those honorable people who collect garbage or are charged with cleaning schools among other things. Well, think again. We will discuss the new meaning of maintenance for the 21st century and opportunities for employment today on Black Issues Forum.
Voiceover: Funding for this program is made possible in part by UNC-TV members.
Bullock-Brown: Hello, and welcome to Black Issues Forum. I'm Natalie Bullock-Brown. Today we are talking about a change that is occurring in our industrial landscape that's creating concern in the business community but also opportunities for those considering employment or a transition in job occupation. We are talking about what one of our guests today calls a maintenance crisis. And we'll meet him along with our other guests in just a moment. But first here is more on the future of maintaining the machines that we rely on and those who we rely on to repair them.
Voiceover: He calls himself the maintenance evangelist and he is spreading a warning message about the future of maintenance in America.
Leonard: It used to be that maintenance guys were basically perceived as Bubbas and Skeeters; guys that are given a wrench and they were not necessarily good in school and they were good with their hands and they went out doing what they could do which is on the mechanical side and that was about it. But with the increased complexity in automation and all the different sophistication of equipment, there is a lot more demand for higher end skilled maintenance professionals. And with automation in facilities, automation in the manufacturing sector, it is requiring a higher level skill set.
Bullock-Brown Joel works to educate business leaders on this concern some who also share his concern about the future.
Shore: People are beginning to retire from the workplace. These are the people who have the knowledge and the abilities to maintain and keep the plants that we have functioning properly. Some of the recent companies that I have been fortunate to assist with recruiting here have been a very high tech high speed plastics manufacturing company, a very high tech, high speed printing company, and believe it or not, a very high tech, high speed rope and twine manufacturer. These people have found a way to make it efficiently and profitably here in the Untied States. How did they do that? They did it through mechanization. They did it through automation. When you mechanize and you automate, you have to have people who understand the complexities of the machinery that exist to make the product. The have to be able to maintain that machinery in order to keep these companies alive, well and competitive and functioning.
Bullock-Brown: Joel's' good news message is that training can help.
Leonard: What Impact does is we train in a week what they teach in semesters in a typical curriculum based semester. We compress it in a one week segment. And so it is a quick burst of competency.
Bullock-Brown: Impact Learning Center is a private training facility. Much of today's current and rising technologies in industrial equipment are housed right here at the training center.
Leonard: If somebody learns how to program these devices, they can make easily $22 an hour just like that. There is over a 100 jobs in the Triad area paying $22 an hour and they are begging for people with the skill sets. They can't find them.
Bullock-Brown Wow, Maybe I need to go get my certificate. One of the beneficiaries of the training provided by Impact is a worker at a manufacturing plant in Greensboro.
Maree: I am a welder and I do welding. I brought my talents of welding into Mother Murphy's as well as some other things. One thing about Mother Murphy and one thing about being in maintenance, you don't do-you don't have to do one thing great. You have to do everything good.
Connor: Mother Murphy's is in its 60th year of business and being a family owned business for 60 years we have got a lot of equipment in our facility that has been old and outdated that we are in the process of updating new equipment. And in updating new equipment those __ new technologies that we need maintenance technicians to understand that technology and be able to bring that to us without us having to use outside vendor as a source for repair and maintenance.
Maree: The time that I went to Impact, the teachers use the basics from if you have something that you are not particularly sure how it works, say electricity, you have to know the basics of electricity and how it works and they have a lab. So everything that you do in the workbook, you go to a lab and you actually experience it firsthand.
Bullock-Brown: While Impact provides condensed training for immediate needs, the issue around maintenance may be more complex.
Kelly: We have all noticed the increased use of technology even in some things that are traditionally low-tech. And so we see that computers are part of our cars and that we have embedded more and more intelligence in the things that we do. These systems require now that the workers who maintain them be more highly trained. But also we recognize that the people who design these systems are being encourage to make them less and less in need of folks to actually maintain them. And so we work to actually design maintenance out of systems so that they can maintain themselves. Our focus is on education which we feel is more enduring than just training students for a particular solution or technology. A lot of times the theory remains too abstract to truly be absorbed and so to have the students have the kind of understanding that you need, we combine the theory with practice by educating them. They are able to track the ever-increasing changes of technology so that they are able to remain viable contributors for many, many years.
Bullock-Brown: A four year degree lies at the extreme opposite end of one week training. In between there are alternatives for both training and education at community colleges. Guilford Technical Community College partners with Impact to bridge a variety of needs for both companies and individuals.
Jerry Kinny: It is a lot cheaper at a community college and you can actually gear your training to fit your lifestyle. A lot of people work and go to school. It's easier to get on and off the campus and it is easier to get into a customized program. And a lot of the training that we do, the company that the employee works for is going to help develop and do the training profile for them.
Bullock-Brown: Certainly there is a cost for the type of training that both Impact and community colleges offer but that cost can be offset through the state funded Focused Industrial Training grant.
Kinny: It is really used to train people that have to have a new technology as an advance into their career or their need with a company.
Bullock-Brown: While private training is important to serve immediate needs, what awaits for maintenance workers in the long term remains debatable.
Kelly: What we may be seeing is the lag between the current generation of technicians who are trained on a technology that has been fairly stable and now as the pace of change increases, we are finding now that there is a need for training so that they keep up with that. But there is really no way to keep up with that pace of change, that we really need to educate these maintenance workers so that they can be more resilient and keep up with this ever-increasing pace of change.
Bullock-Brown: Even so Joel will continue to spread his message to prepare North Carolina for what he believes is a certainty in the short term.
We are talking about what could be a big opportunity for those considering a career in maintenance or engineering. And right now I would like to introduce our guests. We have with us Dr, John Kelly, Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. We also have with us Joel Leonard of the Impact Learning Center in Greensboro. And we have with us Harold Murray, a maintenance technician at Mother Murphy's Laboratory in Greensboro. Welcome to all of you. I would like to start off by asking each of you just to tell me, do we really have a maintenance crisis and if so, how? I am going to start with you Dr. John Kelly.
Kelly: Thank you. Certainly we do. You can see that the equipment that we have is requiring the kind of skills that just aren't existing now. These skills, a very precious few people have and we just need more people than we have.
Bullock-Brown: And, Harold, since you are one of the people that has kind of stepped up and decided, "I want to talk on these skills." What are the prospects for you? What do you feel you are going to be able to accomplish with your new skills?
Maree: With new skills I can accomplish many machines and equipment out there and most of these plants, they got like technical problems and stuff like that. So with the skills that I am learning through Impact and skills I have already learned, I can come in there and try to troubleshoot whereas I am in the company where they would have to go out and find somebody outside the company to come in and try to solve the problem where I can solve it while I am there.
Bullock-Brown: So basically the skills that you have-I know that you were a welder before.
Maree: Yes.
Bullock-Brown: And now with the additional skills that you have you can go pretty much anywhere and apply those skills?
Maree: Pretty much. I like where I am at now but I never learned to settle for where I am at. I always got to go to the top.
Bullock-Brown: I understand. Joel, tell me-I just lost my thought-with your training program, what is your goal? What is your goal in teaching the new skills in order to meet this crisis and again, how much of a crisis is there?
Leonard: Well, the true value of a maintenance personnel is not measured in the problems that they solve but in the problems that never arise. And our headlines are being littered and populated with numerous instances everyday. Jet Blue's miracle landing with the pilot with the landing misconnected on the front, they attributed that to a maintenance problem. The 24 people that died during hurricane Rita evacuation was attributed to poor maintenance on the bus because the rotors got too hot and the oxygen tanks exploded. We have a population that takes it for granted the facilities, engineering and maintenance functions. And with the increase in automation in manufacturing sector, it is becoming more and more requirement for an organization to find highly skilled maintenance technicians. Dr. John Gardner, the former head of the educational welfare system, he said, "The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, yet tolerates shoddiness and philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity will have neither-good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes or theories of water". So as we look forward and trying to elevate and not have to give away incentive programs and all these different initiatives-we have lost so many jobs here in the state of North Carolina, if we build the skill sets, if we build the engineers, we build the maintenance technicians, use maintenance and engineers as a fulcrum to build the businesses in our infrastructure of our society will be stronger. And North Carolina will increase its productivity. And if we do that as a country we will be, we will move into unbelievable performance. But we don't value that. We value entertainment.
Bullock-Brown: Well, let me jump in because one of the things that you said, Dr. John, in the piece that we saw is that in your line of expertise, in your field, in electrical engineering and computer engineering, that the point or the purpose or maybe even the mission is to develop systems that are going to be maintenance free, that will actually maintain themselves. So how do we have a maintenance crisis on the one hand but at the same time it sounds like ultimately even what Harold is learning to do is going to be done away with because systems will be able to take care of themselves.
Kelly: They will never be without some maintenance functions. If, for example, you look at automobiles, it used to be that tune-ups were frequently required. They are not. Spark plugs last 100,000 miles. But you still have to take your car ii for maintenance. S we are replacing repair with maintenance. And this is the engineer's function; to design more robust systems.
Bullock-Brown: And are-as you being at NC A&T, of course the people that you are teaching are African American but in general are you seeing a lot of African Americans moving towards this sort of expertise?
Kelly: Absolutely. We are really excited by that because nationally the numbers of students of all ethnicity is flat or decreasing who are entering engineering and so it is a good thing for the country that we have an increase interest in the African American community. We are also very blessed that a large number of these students are females. And that brings diversity to the solutions that are generated. And we see extreme value in that.
Bullock-Brown: Well, Harold, I have a couple of questions for you but one is what Joel is saying about this issue of the appearance of what it means to be a maintenance person. Do you experience any of that in the work that you do and what do you think it is-if there is a stigma, how do you think that would affect female maintenance workers?
Maree: Well, I think the first stigma probably is, when I first got on at Mother Murphy I told certain people in my family that I was in maintenance and they thought that I took trash out, mopped floors and stuff like that. And I tried to explain to them that it was more of a technical field that I am in. I don't mind-you have to be able to get your hands dirty sometimes. Not all the time but you got to be able to be a problem solver. You have to use your mind. You have to use your hands. You have to have just a general knowledge of certain things. Once you begin to understand something then you probably are able to solve the problem or find out what the problem is.
Bullock-Brown: Well, it sounds like the maintenance tech is something or is a person hat really sort of straddles the fence between the maintenance worker of old and what we tend to think of when we think of an engineer, someone who is designing software and designing things highly intellectual work. Would you say that that is the case?
Leonard: In fact, I even labeled that. We again, we still use paradigms and terminology from 50 years ago and we had unbelievable transitions and revolutionary change. We flattened our business structure. We removed a majority of our middle-management. We have automated a lot of the blue collar positions. And we are now really requiring higher level skill sets in all functions. And so the higher paying jobs are, people are garnering those wages, they can do multiple functions, perform multiple capacities and be able to understand engineering drawings and that also go out and implement the strategies and processes. So those kinds of people, I labeled, I gave them a name because nobody really defined it. I called them green collars.
Bullock-Brown: Hmm. Green collars. Well, Dr. Kelly, let me get you back in here and I am wondering if your students-well, two things. If your students who are interested in perhaps becoming maintenance techs, or even just in general are interested in engineering. Are they interested in getting their hands dirty as Harold suggested? But also, how does this new sort of need for a maintenance technician affect the pay scale in engineering in general?
Kelly: First of all I think our students are very glad to do hands-on work. As I said earlier, this really reinforces the theory and the learning that they have gotten in classroom. So, yes, they are very comfortable with that aspect. Does it affect the pay scale? No, it doesn't. What actually happens is we are beginning to, as Joel said, flatten the structure so that these engineers appreciate what the maintenance technicians are doing and as they go design the next generation machine they are talking to the people that maintain them and say, "So what can I do to make this system more robust? More reliable? Easier for you to use?"
Bullock-Brown: And Harold, in the experience that you have had and in particularly in working at Mother Murphy's, what sort of things have you noticed about the machines of old that you are now trying to update for them that perhaps would help the engineers, the electrical engineers and the computer engineers to design better systems for the future?
Maree: Well, most of their equipment is pretty old and they have a lot of-we have a lot of electrical problems and I think it is because that company has been there for over, I think, 50 years. So the problems that I see mostly are with the electrical circuits and fuses blowing because something is overloaded. We have to learn to-I am not an engineer but the engineers have to learn to try to devise, try to make something more simple where it will take less wires. Because I can look into a control panel and it is like somebody threw spaghetti in it. I can't understand the wire configuration. And you have to pretty much troubleshoot and understand where the power source is coming at to where it is going, to understand where the problem is coming from. And then you have to shut everything down and try to solve the problem. So if we had something a little simpler, it might make everything a little better.
Bullock-Brown: Let me stick with you for a moment and ask you when you decided that you were going to pursue these new skills, what did you have to do? Where did you go? What was the beginning of the process?
Maree: The beginning of the process? Before I came to work for Mother Murphy I worked at Krispy Kreme. I got a lot of knowledge from Krispy Kreme. I became a welder about 10 years ago. So I took my welding skills along with working with Krispy Kreme. I built equipment, I wired up motors, I wired up and PLC controllers.
Bullock-Brown: What are PLC controllers?
Maree: They are automated controllers. I believe the function is to have everything controlled by just one panel where it is just a push button control. I took the knowledge that I had and I wanted to enhance it by getting with Joel at Impact Learning and through Joel and Impact Learning it got me on at Mother Murphy's. Now I can take what I know and what Impact Learning is teaching me to Mother Murphy's to make them a better company, a company that runs efficiently in not breaking down all the time.
Bullock-Brown: Got you. Now, Joel, Harold is a maintenance tech at Mother Murphy's. What are some of the range of titles that someone who might desire to pursue new skills in maintenance tech work, what sort of titles are they going to have?
Leonard: Well, there is a variety of different technologies that they need to embrace. I mean, you could become a mechanical helper. You could become a mechanic. You become an electrical helper. You can become an electrician. Or you become an electronic helper and become an electronic technician or you could actually become a maintenance manager, a maintenance planner, a facilities director, a facilities engineer..
Bullock-Brown: Let me stop you just for one moment because with facilities-now we often hear that especially if you are on a college campus. You hear that all the time-facility's planning, facility's manager, facility's engineering. What does that mean?
Leonard: The facility manager is responsible for a whole host of basically the whole environment that the campus cultivates. It actually-everything that the heating and venting and air conditioning, all the buildings, all the assets, everything that is on a campus a facility director is responsible for. And so he has security demands, he has environmental demands, he has maintenance demands, he has engineering demands, he has construction demands. So he has a lot of demands on his time and a lot of focus and a lot of responsibility. As a result those types of positions can pay $65-100,000. The median income in North Carolina is $65,000 according to salarysurvery.com.
Bullock-Brown: So these sorts of jobs can pay quite well.
Leonard: Oh, yes.
Bullock-Brown: Dr. Kelly, in what you do with the students-well, since you work with students, can you just take us down the journey that a student-if someone-let's say they were in middle school decided that this is something that I want to do. I know someone, my uncle does this. This is something I am drawn to. What sort of classes are they going to have to take?
Kelly: The most important thing, as you probably are aware, is mathematics. Math is so very important for students. And the decision, as you have identified, needs to be made in middle school. Because if you don't take the right math in middle school then by the time you finish high school you won't have the math preparation to take calculus in college. We recognize this and we recognize that there are some really good engineers out there who may not have gotten the kind of advice that they needed to in middle school. And so we do accept students who didn't get that advice and work with them to take that math when they come to us so that they can contribute to the solutions that the nation needs.
Bullock-Brown: What kind of things do you recognize in students that may not have gotten the proper advice early on but that tell you that this person does have what it takes?
Kelly: As you probably remember from reading Good to Great, they talked about moving a whole company to the middle of the country because the work ethic was so strong there. We really try to find that the students have the work ethic that it takes to persevere and do the hard work that is required in engineering.
Bullock-Brown: And, Harold, I am going to probably give you the last word. I am just wondering, what are your goals for the future? Where do you want this work and these skills to take you ultimately?
Maree: The ultimate goal for me has always been to reach the top of my profession. If being a maintenance tech is going to be my profession then I would say I want to be a facility manager or a maintenance manager. Someone that maybe I can bring in without the skills to teach them what I know in order to be successful in life.
Bullock-Brown: And so you would recommend this to other people I take it?
Maree: I would recommend it to other people and to say that I have a son and he is in college and I also told him, "Don't settle for one opportunity, one job. Learn multiple things because being a maintenance tech you have to know multiple things."
Bullock-Brown: Thank you very much. I would like to thank all of our guests for contributing to this most vibrant discussion today and if you would like to get in touch with our guests or obtain a copy or transcript of today's show, visit us online at unctv.org/bif. And when you visit be sure to give us your comments and program suggestions. You can also call us on the BIF line at 919-549-7167 and make sure to join us each Sunday afternoon at 4:30. For Black Issues Forum, I am Natalie Bullock-Brown reminding you to always be encouraged not matter what. Have a good one.
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