4 ms·
You make a very important point with regards to manufacturing providing jobs for both high and low skill workers. I would add that it can also be a very good wa
by Inconel 10y ago
You make a very important point with regards to manufacturing providing jobs for both high and low skill workers. I would add that it can also be a very good way to go from being a low skill worker to becoming a high skill worker on the job, meaning that you are being paid while improving your skills. If you're already poor and don't have any particular skills, it can be extremely difficult to improve upon your situation while trying to make enough money to survive. Many times additional schooling, either at the college/university or trade school/community college level, are out of reach, or at least made much more difficult, once you've already worked a 40-50 hour week.
I work as a technician in aerospace and when I started I had zero experience in this type of manufacturing environment. If I hadn't gotten the opportunity to improve upon my skills while on the job I would most likely still be stuck in a much lower paid and less satisfactory low end retail or service job.
- rfrank 10y agoDefinitely, the on-the-job training aspect of a manufacturing job is huge, and there's just so much knowledge that's hard to pass on in a set of standards and best practices. Agreed on all points about skill development & continued education when you're poor. It strikes me as one of the harder problems to fix when it comes to mobility/inequality as the economy changes. You sound a lot like me professionally haha. I had the same level of experience when I started at the EMS provider I'm with, just doing CAD library stuff and learning as much as I could when requests were light. Graduated to helping out with bits of full board designs like routing/placement, then graduated to full boards eventually. Having both a design team and SMT lines in the back to learn from is invaluable experience that's hard to recreate.