{"243951":{"#nid":"243951","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Shortage of tooling engineers could be hurting U.S. manufacturing","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EDespite the fact that many manufacturing plants are coming to the United States such as KIA here in Georgia and Mercedes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., much of the highly skilled manufacturing work is not performed here. The investments in these announcements, according to Ravind Shrotria, DFX and DFM Manager at Coca-Cola, is in items such as equipment that is purchased overseas. The plants indeed create jobs, but are they creating the jobs that the United States should be targeting?\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201c90 percent of tooling in these two plants come from Germany or Korea,\u0022 said Shrotria, who discussed the U.S. tooling engineer shortage at a recent Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute Brown Bag Seminar. \u0022Are we creating a new generation of blue collar workers or very highly skilled manufacturing employees?\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe tooling engineer workforce that was developed in the mid-20\u003Csup\u003Eth\u003C\/sup\u003E century is hitting retirement age, and the United States has not invested in developing a new crop of these skilled workers. \u201cWe have relied heavily on new technologies to give us the advantage over the competition in terms of tooling, but that has not borne the fruit that we expected,\u201d said Shrotria. \u201cToday tool and die shops are shutting down in Pennsylvania and other places because the skill set is not being developed. This lack of training of second generation tooling engineers in the United States is going to hit us hard as other countries build this workforce and we do not.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETooling is a very specialized area of manufacturing and mechanical engineering which comprises of the analysis, planning, design, construction, application tools, methods, procedures and techniques, necessary to increase manufacturing productivity in the economy. It requires an apprenticeship period, usually lasting about four years. The investment in that four years is a hindrance for some, but it is an investment that begins to pay off before the training is completed, according to Shrotria. \u201cBy the fourth year, the investment in the student begins to generate returns,\u201d he added.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAfter four years, a tooling engineer can expect to make $9 to $21 per hour. \u201cSome ask if a burger flipper can make $9 an hour, why put in the effort? But those jobs aren\u2019t skilled,\u201d noted Shrotria. \u201cTooling is a skilled job and it will lead somewhere.\u201d If tool design skills are included in the training or picked up later, the pay for these workers increases to $18 to $40-plus per hour.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe reason the United States is falling behind is because the U.S. education system is unfriendly to producing tool designers and tool makers, according to Shrotria. Unlike its European and Asian counterparts, the United States fails to set up a system that identifies those students more suited for university and the ones more suited for tooling programs.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cIf all the money in the world was distributed equally amongst all peoples on this planet, then in the first 1 hour of the equal distribution, there will be some that will have more than 50 times what was given to them,\u201d explained Shrotria. \u201cThe difference is based on intellect. In the United States, everyone is equal, but in Europe, they identify engineer students that are qualified to move onto university and the ones better suited for another [tooling] program. The United States does not acknowledge this.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMany of the most successful tooling training programs are propagated by the Europeans throughout the world. China and other Asian competitors have programs set up to train tooling engineers and the United States continues to fall behind. \u201cWe have realized this a little too late,\u201d said Shrotria. \u201cSome say we can import these workers, but importing is not a solution; it is a temporary fix. To grab the edge in manufacturing, we need more specialized tooling engineers versus more engineers overall.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETo do this, Shrotria provided a list of recommendations:\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cul\u003E\u003Cli\u003EStudents must be identified right out of high school and directed into a tooling program\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003EInvest in tooling training and apprenticeships because that investment will generate returns by the third for fourth year\u003C\/li\u003E\u003C\/ul\u003E\u003Cul\u003E\u003Cli\u003EDevelop programs to produce credits or bachelor\u2019s degree programs after completion\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003EInvest in research and skill development using federal-private funding\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003EOffer tax incentives to foreign companies setting up manufacturing plants in the United States for procuring a certain percentage of tooling in the United States\u003C\/li\u003E\u003C\/ul\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThere must be a strong public private partnership to develop this skill set,\u201d said Shrotria. \u201cIn Malaysia and Singapore they pay tool makers very well \u2013 not only from the company but the government chips in to pay these workers during that four years of training. It is this strong partnership between public and private sectors that brings these programs to life.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe GTMI Brown Bag Seminar Series takes place each Monday between noon and 1 p.m. in the Manufacturing Research Building, Room 114. Students and faculty are invited and are welcome to bring their lunch to the meeting. If you have questions or you want to be added to the reminder list for these events, please contact Tina Guldberg at \u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:tina.guldberg@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Etina.guldberg@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EAt a recent Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute Brown Bag Seminar, Coca-Cola Freestyle\u0027s Ravind Shrotria discussed why the United States is falling behind in terms of developing a new class of tooling engineers and the impact this shortage will have on the nation\u0027s manufacturing sector.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"At a recent Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute Brown Bag Seminar, Coca-Cola Freestyle\u0027s Ravind Shrotria discussed why the United States is falling behind in terms of developing a new class of tooling engineers and the impact this shortage will have"}],"uid":"27857","created_gmt":"2013-10-09 16:55:28","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:15:05","author":"Tracy Heath","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2013-10-09T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2013-10-09T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"155831","name":"Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI)"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"4096","name":"brown bag"},{"id":"215","name":"manufacturing"},{"id":"76301","name":"tooling engineer"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ETina Guldberg\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E404-385-4950\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["tina.guldberg@gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}