Definitely, 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 b

Definitely, 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.