EP 19: The Workforce Gap Isn’t a Talent Problem. It’s a Partnership Problem.

The workforce gap is one of the biggest challenges facing advanced manufacturing. But what if we’ve been treating it as someone else’s problem?

In the first episode of our new workforce series, our host Shon Anderson sits down with Matt Kirchner, a manufacturing executive turned workforce and technical education advocate, to explore why building the next generation of manufacturing talent requires stronger partnerships between industry, education, and policymakers.

Matt challenges manufacturers to move beyond simply asking for people with the right “soft skills” and take a more active role in shaping the talent pipeline. They discuss what meaningful industry-education partnerships actually look like, why companies need to invest in the workforce they already have, and what separates leaders who drive change from those who remain stuck in the status quo.

They also explore the role of public policy, why career exposure needs to begin much earlier than high school graduation, and how even small manufacturers and rural communities can take meaningful action.

The workforce gap won’t be solved by education, industry, or policymakers working alone. It takes all three—and it starts by changing the conversation from “Where is the talent?” to “What are we doing to help build it?”

About the Show
The Additive Advantage Podcast explores what it really takes to turn additive manufacturing into a scalable, performance-driven business capability. Hosted by Dani Mason and Shon Anderson, the show features real conversations with leaders accountable for outcomes — not hype.

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Hosted by Dani Mason and Shon Anderson, industry leaders with deep experience in technology and additive manufacturing.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

I think part of the challenge is, and it's um i it's really about sometimes it's easier for a manufacturing employer, and again I'm speaking as one, um, to complain about the problem rather than doing the hard work of solving it. In other words, I remember in my days of running businesses, maybe I wasn't an owner early on, I was somebody that was working for somebody else. It was a lot easier for us sometimes to find a culprit and blame the culprit than to really do the hard work of facing up to why our business isn't performing the way that it should be. And I think there becomes a level of it of maturity over the course of a career where you know at some point you realize nobody cares about your solutions, they care about your or your excuses. I I should say nobody cares about your excuses, they care about your results. But but the truth of the matter is that I think a lot of times employers who haven't done the homework on the different options available to them and to their market and to their educators in terms of solving for the talent gap, if you will, that if you haven't done the hard work in educating yourself on those things, it's a lot easier to just point the finger at, well, we'd be, you know, our EBD, our EBITDA would be higher, our quality would be better, our throughput would be better, our expenses would be lower, what have you, if we had a better workforce.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Welcome to the Additive Advantage Podcast, where we explore the people, technologies, and strategies shaping the future of manufacturing. I'm Danny Mason, and I'm here with my co-host Sean Anderson. Whether you're leading an additive program, evaluating new technologies, or looking for practical ways to improve manufacturing outcomes, we're glad you're joining us.

SPEAKER_03 1:33

Today's conversation tackles one of the biggest challenges facing not just additive, but advanced manufacturing as a whole, and that's the future of the workforce. Whether we're talking with manufacturers, educators, policymakers, or technology leaders, this theme keeps coming up. It's finding, developing, and retaining the skilled people you need to make America's advanced manufacturing renaissance happen. But what if we've been asking the wrong questions? Our guest today believes the workforce gap isn't simply an education problem or a hiring problem, it's a partnership problem. And solving it requires industry, education, and policymakers to rethink the way that we all work together. So joining us today is Matt Kirkner. I'm excited for you to hear from him. Matt's a manufacturing executive turned workforce advocate who has led companies in the manufacturing space and today works at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, technical education, economic development, and I'm going to give him some credit in the public policy arena as well with his multiple companies. Through those companies and a podcast and some advisory work, Matt is helping shape workforce initiatives across industry, schools, government, and universities. In this conversation, we're going to explore what manufacturers should really be asking for and why upskilling your existing workforce may be even more important than recruiting new talent. We'll also take a look at how education can better prepare students for modern manufacturing careers and what leaders at every level need to be doing to help close that workforce gap. Well, welcome to another episode of the Additive Advantage. I'm Sean Anderson, your host, and I'm honored to be joined this morning by Matt Kirchner. Matt, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Well, Sean, it's absolutely awesome to be with you, and thanks for the invitation.

SPEAKER_03 3:29

So for our audience, um over the past almost year now that we've been doing this, whether I'm speaking with executives, frontline technical professionals, policymakers, the topic of workforce comes up in almost every conversation. We've decided to take a deep dive into this topic of workforce from the perspectives of educators, industry, and policymakers. And we're going to kick that series off with a man who's deeply engaged with all three. I've been fired up about this episode for ever since he and I had the uh kind of exploratory call. Um and Matt Kirchner is going to help us with some framing around this tremendous opportunity. Matt, so good again to have you on the episode. And before we dive in, it might be helpful to our audience if you shared a little bit about your unique position and background that brings you into contact with these stakeholder groups and how that fits into what you do.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Well, and I'm I'm happy to do that, Sean, because I'm so excited to be on the editive advantage. And just really, really quickly, I mean, you and I met each other several years ago. You're in business, you're doing this kind of work for exactly the right reasons. You're a mission-driven individual, you're trying to make the world a better place and having tremendous success in doing that. So I can't answer that first question without first just thanking you for your incredible leadership and Danny as well and the entire team at the additive advantage because you're making a difference. It's important work, and I'm honored to be a part of this discussion. Uh, in a large part because I've watched this world of work transform itself over the course of a career that has now spanned some, I think, 40 years, give or take. And so you see a lot of things over the course of or is over the course of that period of time. Uh I spent 30 years in manufacturing, Sean, as you know. I was a manufacturing CEO, manufacturing chief operating officer. So I've lived in the trenches, on the ground in the world of manufacturing. And then about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more, uh, we sold our manufacturing company. There's a long story behind that. I won't go into all of those details, but I got to the point where I needed to figure out what came next. And we had a lot of options. You know, the sale of our company ended the way that you dream those things do. And my wife Renee and I sat down and said, we want to do something with a huge mission attached to it. And it was at that point that we dedicated the rest of our careers to doing what we call as securing the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. Without going into too much detail, I'll just share a couple things. We own three companies that collectively are the largest distributors of technical education and STEM learning systems in the country. Those three companies are Lab Midwest, ATS Midwest, and Mission Learning Systems. So we work with educators and industrial employers across seven U.S. states in the upper Midwest, talking to them and sharing with them ideas about how they can expand and improve their ability to bring workforce skills, relevant skills to their workforce and to their students. So that's a huge part of what I do. We also have a media company, and you've got a tremendously successful podcast. We've got a little podcast as well called the Tech Ed Podcast, where we talk with all kinds of people doing really cool stuff in STEM and technical education that is owned by a company called the Tech Ed Media Group. And through that group, I do a lot of public speaking, a lot of advocacy. We do the podcast, of course, but that's really all around spreading the word about the incredible opportunities in advanced manufacturing and STEM that are available to our students. I also have an opportunity to spend a fair amount of time now in the private equity and venture capital side of things. So we're invested in and active in a number of manufacturing companies, particularly, usually small to mid-sized manufacturing companies, love keeping them in the Midwest where I live. And so a lot of what we do is making sure that as companies are transitioning ownership, making sure that as founders have really good ideas related to technology, that they've got strong reason, including the capital that they need to keep those companies here in the Midwest, keep those jobs here in the Midwest. So we see a lot of different aspects of education and industry, and it's really the convergence of all of those endeavors and a few other ones that really puts us in a position to, I feel like, have at least a little bit of an idea of what's happening in terms of the future of work and what we need to do to upskill the existing and future workforce for the innovation and technology evolution that's taking place as we sit here and talk.

SPEAKER_03 7:53

You know, for our audience, I want to give Matt another opportunity. So you heard him talk a lot about STEM students, et cetera. But Matt, you and your companies are also deeply engaged in the upskilling and retraining of people already in the workforce with your client base, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 8:08

That's absolutely correct, Sean. And I think a lot of times that gets overlooked in this whole discussion around how we get young people excited about careers in STEM and careers in technical, uh technical fields, whether it's the skilled trades, whether it's advanced manufacturing, and so on. If you think about it, you know, literally 20 years from now, if I'm somebody that is running a manufacturing company, and I certainly have done that, 20 years from now, give or take, 75, 80% of your workforce that is going to be working in your business in 20 years is already working in your workforce today. And as technology changes, and certainly the tit the changes that you're seeing on the additive side, the changes that we're seeing in the way products are manufactured, in the way AI and data and predictive analytics are now becoming more and more important in the world of manufacturing. This world of manufacturing, this workforce is changing like crazy. And we not just we don't just have to focus on what's right for students who are in middle school, high school, technical, or community college universities, but it's equally important to make sure that we're equipping our incumbent workers, people already working in our businesses with the requisite skills that are going to enable them to be successful over the course of the next two decades and beyond, because the skills that worked 10 years ago aren't going to work 10 years from now.

SPEAKER_03 9:23

Excellent. Well, maybe the right spot to jump in is you know, you've spent decades working at the intersection of manufacturing, education, workforce development. From your perspective, what's different now that would make you say, you know, we need to change the conversation about the future of manufacturing talent?

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Lots and lots of trends. I mean, we start with the technologies that we're seeing in manufacturing. And in my days of manufacturing, we had a lot of electromechanical technology, but it was mainly driven by programmable logic controllers, analog sensors, mechanical drives, motor and motion control, and you know, basic ACDC electricity. None of that is going away. But as we move more and more into this field of automation, of robotics, of smart sensors and smart devices, of cloud-based technologies, of data sets that we're now analyzing with artificial intelligence to find patterns in them to improve our processes, the technology is changing at warp speed. And so that's the first one. And you talk about that certainly regularly on this podcast. The other thing that is changing is just the realities of the demographics in the workforce. And you start looking at the numbers of people walking through, and it's I can just say it anecdotally, I walk through a lot of manufacturing plants, and the people that are out on the floor doing the work, 55 years old, 60 years old. Well, guess what? It's not going to be long before those people start deciding that it's time for them to retire. And in fact, we're already seeing that. And so as people move out of the workforce, we're creating this gap that we really need to fill in terms of having that skilled talent. So all of our what we call tribal knowledge, all of the information that it gets amassed in an individual over the course of time, they see every problem on a production line, they solve every problem, they understand how those problems manifest themselves across the entire manufacturing process. A lot of that knowledge is walking out the door with people who are reaching retirement age and rightly so going on to greener pastures or at least different ones. And so that's creating a huge vacuum in manufacturing in terms of skilled talent. You know, I read these articles, I just read one last week, Sean, about people that have been out of work for six months or more, literally falling out of the calculation of unemployment because they're no longer looking for work and they're saying we just can't find the right job. And it's like, oh my goodness, every manufacturing company that I walk into is begging for great talent. The jobs that are out there, we need to connect the right people with the right jobs, but lots of moving pieces in and around the workforce for sure.

SPEAKER_03 11:55

I love all of that because what what I hope our audience is picking up loud and clear from you is huge opportunity here. And oftentimes I think, you know, people hear about AI and oh my gosh, Elon Musk is gonna replace us with robots, whatever. You know, obviously there's gonna continue to be humans involved. Um maybe the the right place to start when we think about you know the interaction between industry and education. You shared a couple things with me in our exploratory call that I want our audience to get the chance to hear as well. You know, you talked about one of the big misconceptions being around soft skills. And you know, manufacturers are are kind of saying, well, just you know, we just want some people with good work ethic, have them get here on time and we'll take care of the rest. Maybe that's not going as well as as they had hoped. Tell us what you've learned and and what some of the stakeholders you're talking to have shared about that.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

Absolutely. Well, it's a it's an interesting question because I like to preface the answer with asking people working in manufacturing, working in HR, people who are hiring this next generation of talent for you know any kind of a company, but specific to this discussion, advanced manufacturing. And and I say, imagine you have a choice between two people, and that first person has those quote soft skills that you mentioned. So I like, as I like to put it, we want people who come to work every day, stay off of drugs, and can take direction, right? And no doubt those are important attributes for somebody to have if they're working in any company or any organization, certainly in advanced manufacturing. So let's say we have two people, the first person has those three character traits, but they don't have any of the hard skills. So they don't understand manufacturing technology or human machine interfaces or sensors or data acquisition or machine operation. So they don't understand any of the basic nuts and bolts, safety, quality, production processes, maintenance, some of these basic skills. So our first person has all of the quote soft skills. They come to work every day, they stay off of drugs, and they're able to take some direction, but they have no experience in advanced manufacturing. Let's say the other person that we're looking at hiring Sean has those soft skills. So they have the both come both individuals have the soft skills, but that second person has all those things that we just talked about. They've been through perhaps a certification program around advanced manufacturing skills, and they can walk into the shop onto the shop floor, job ready, career ready, because they understand advanced manufacturing. So now we have a decision to make. Do we hire the person with just the soft skills, or we do we hire the person with the soft skills and the hard skills? The obvious answer is we hire that second person, right? We hire the person that can hit the ground running. The problem we have, and I've seen it over and over and over again, Sean, is that industrial manufacturers, because they can't find the second person, in many cases that person doesn't exist, they go to their educators and say, look, all we want is someone that comes to work every day and stays off of drugs and has the ability to follow some directions, and that is what educators are hearing. So the message that so many of our educators are hearing is our manufacturing manufacturers don't care about hard skills, all they care about is soft skills. Who are they hearing that from? The manufacturers. And I've sat in meeting after meeting after meeting hearing people say that. And I'm like, don't sell yourself short. There's all kinds of opportunities. You're just not aware of them for whatever reason. And I'm not saying you, Sean, aren't aware of them. I'm saying that that hypothetical manufacturer isn't aware of them, all kinds of opportunities that we have to upskill the next generation of the workforce, and those people are out there. They're walking through uh certification programs from organizations like NACD and MSSC and Sokka and dozens and dozens of other ones, and they have those skills. You just have to find them and we have to create more of them. So, what I ask our employers to do is please, please, please knock off this idea of just telling your educators you only need soft skills. You need them both. You're settling for soft skills because you can't find them both. Let's start demanding the level of talent that is requisite for the next generation of advanced manufacturing technology, not just the come to work every day, stay off of drugs, and be able to take direction, but also have an understanding of advanced manufacturing so you hit the ground running when you get to work.

SPEAKER_03 16:19

Makes complete sense. I want to build on that a little bit because, you know, we still in the circles that I um tend to circulate in, I'm still hearing some of the same conversations that we've been hearing for decades about, you know, a student debt and parents steering kids away from manufacturing, uh, you know, the old it's dirty, dangerous, and and uh dark, and you know, nobody wants these jobs. Why do you think the conversation hasn't evolved?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Well, I think there's a number of reasons, and I and I would say that, you know, at least to give people like you, Sean, a little bit of credit. I think we've evolved a little bit. We're certainly hearing things today that we didn't hear 10 years ago in terms of I think a much broader willingness on the part of some parents and some students uh to understand or to consider alternative pathways following secondary education, following high school, and that not everybody ought to be on this four-year path. And so we're starting to open up to technical college and we're opening up to community college and directed workforce, uh, military, uh, and so on, all these great options that are available to our students, not to say that a four-year degree isn't isn't one of them, but it's one of many. Uh, but I think part of the challenge is, and it's um it's really about sometimes it's easier for a manufacturing employer, and again, I'm speaking as one, um, to complain about the problem rather than doing the hard work of solving it. In other words, I remember in my days of running businesses, maybe I wasn't an owner early on, I was somebody that was working for somebody else. It was a lot easier for us sometimes to find a culprit and blame the culprit than to really do the hard work of facing up to why our business isn't performing the way that it should be. And I think there becomes a level of it of maturity over the course of a career where you know at some point you realize nobody cares about your solutions, they care about your or your excuses. I I should say nobody cares about your excuses, they care about your results. But but the truth of the matter is that I think a lot of times employers who haven't done the homework on the different options available to them and to their market and to their educators in terms of solving for the talent gap, if you will, that if you haven't done the hard work in educating yourself on those things, it's a lot easier to just point the finger at, well, we'd be, you know, our EBD, our EBITDA would be higher, our quality would be better, our throughput would be better, our expenses would be lower, what have you, if we had a better workforce. And so you can blame this boogeyman of the lack of skill talent for maybe the lack of performance in the organization rather than taking on the responsibility of saying, all right, to the extent that that is a root cause of our poor performance or underperforming organizations, let's be part and active, part of and active in solving for that problem. And there's a there's a lot of things that employers can be doing rather than just sitting around the table and complaining about their educators or complaining about uh society or parents or what have you. So lots and lots of work to do, I think. And it's really incumbent upon you know, not just our industrial employers, but to your question to our to our parents, to young people themselves of really understanding the options available to them, exploring those and picking the one that's best for them.

SPEAKER_03 19:29

You have a couple of comments on that. One being that, you know, when I hear people lamenting, oh, you know, my son or daughter went to went to college and got this degree, and now there's no jobs for that degree, you know, was your son or daughter the kind of person that really likes to sit still at a computer for 40 or 50 hours a week? Maybe you could have seen this coming. Um, I think we've we've not, you know, especially I was in the workforce early in my career when this transformation started to happen where somebody decided everyone needed a four-year degree and all of a sudden the the you know person that ran shipping all of a sudden needed a logistics degree, even though they'd done the job successfully for 20 years. Um I think we for some kids, you know, my son to his credit after high school said, Dad, I don't think I could sign up for four more years of locked to a desk staring at a book. And, you know, so didn't go to college right away. May at some point, but realized he wasn't going to be very disciplined at sitting through that now. You know, these are jobs that, you know, for someone who can't sit still for eight hours, frankly, that's a good thing because you shouldn't be sitting still for eight hours, at least in any of the positions in our facility. And the facilities are clean, the benefits are good. Um I just think we've we you know, this whole student loan debt thing isn't just about the degrees, it's about the match between the talent and the need in the workforce. Um You know, the other the other thing that I want to add in is to me the challenge for all those folks, oh, our EBITI would be better if this and blah, blah, blah. Well, when unfortunately, when you're in charge, your job is to set the context. That means bring in new talent. That means invest wherever you need to invest to get the talent you need. You don't get the luxury of sitting back making excuses. Um I I know you and I are 100% aligned on that. Um I I want to go a step further here because you talk to so many manufacturers. Do you think that manufacturers and maybe industry in general underestimates their role in shaping the future workforce?

SPEAKER_01 21:37

For sure. And I there again, I think we've made some progress, and I can certainly highlight a lot of organizations and companies that have stepped up and taken an active role in engaging with their local educators, understanding the challenges that they face, recognizing that industry and education don't speak the same language. We have to acknowledge that up front that there's going to be things about each other that frustrate us. We need to get past that. So there's a lot of Of examples of companies that are starting to understand the importance of engaging with education and helping to solve the problem. We still have a lot of folks that are, you know, look basically pointing at um pointing at other constituencies and blaming them. It's real easy to blame your local high school for not producing talent that you want to hire in your local manufacturing company. But have you really sat down and done the hard work of listening to some of the challenges that they're running into? Have you done the hard work of inviting them into your facility, showing them what you do, showing them the kinds of jobs that are available in your facility? Is your plant the kind of plant that somebody's going to walk into and say, this is a place for me? You know, credit free to your son, Sean, for having the foresight to recognize. And by the way, that was me graduating from high school. I just didn't understand all the options that were available to me. No regrets about the path that I took, but I was the kid that couldn't sit still. I was the kid that was always getting into trouble for screwing around in the back of the classroom, for being fidgety, for not paying attention, uh, you know, all of those things, which by the way are the same personality traits that tend to make you successful in manufacturing. But we try to quell all those in our students when they're growing up. Not sure why we do that, but we try to fit them into a mold a lot of times that isn't right for everybody. But starting to recognize that we have an opportunity to inspire students around advanced manufacturing, we have to show them what's available to them, what these facilities look like, and making sure that our facilities are five S'd and like I said, the kind of places that people would want to come to work. Um putting our money where our mouth is is another big one. You know, we see a lot of a lot of um high school programs, if you will, and that you walk into the manufacturing facility or the area where they're teaching technical education and it doesn't look like your plant, they're not working with the kinds of technologies that they're going to see when they get into manufacturing. And so making sure that we're showing our students all kinds of opportunities. But if my whole paradigm of manufacturing is just doing a project on a vinyl cutter, there's so much more to manufacturing that is available to our students. So we need to make sure those programs look more realistic. The only way that we can do that is to educate our educators on what advanced manufacturing technology looks like. So as a manufacturing employer, am I really engaged in that way? And then the other thing I'll tell you is that, and it's, you know, it's a tough pill to swallow because margins are tight in manufacturing, but I can tell you that the companies that are getting access to the talent are the companies that are investing their time and investing their economic and financial resources in stepping up their tech ed programs in their local regions and in their local towns, villages, cities, and so on, and creating the kind of tech ed program in that high school that is going to inspire young people toward careers in manufacturing.

SPEAKER_03 24:46

Well, you touched on something a second ago, Matt, and you talked about this educators and folks in industry speaking different language. How do you bridge that communication gap? And I'm just going to start there because if we can't do that, all that other stuff you talked about sounds great. If we can't figure out how to talk to each other, we'll never get there.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

How do we start? Awesome, awesome question. I think the first one, and this is uh advice that was given to me a long time ago by a high school or a um a K-12 superintendent, I should say, is you number one, you check the agenda at the door, right? Whatever paradigm we have as manufacturers about uh, you know, how hard educators work or what you know what their politics are or you know what their teachers union is saying or what have you. I mean, you know, you hear all that. Um in whatever paradigm an educator might have about you know a manufacturer just being a capitalist or just caring about money or just worrying about the bottom line, blow all that up before you walk in the door. One of the things that I've learned about education coming from industry is a lot of the paradigms that I had about educators before I got onto this side of the world in education weren't exactly accurate. And I and there's you just learn a lot of things about um how dedicated they are, how much they care about their students, how they genuinely want to create the right pathways for their students. Really, really important. And I've heard the same thing from educators where they say, you know, I I didn't recognize until I really sat down with my industrial employers in my area how much they cared about the kids in my district and how much they cared about their success and how much they wanted me as a teacher to be successful, you start to understand some of that. So the first thing is to just kind of check the agenda at the door and whatever paradigm you have about the other side, just you know, whether it's true or not, just forget about it because that's you're dwelling in those kind of things are not going to be productive and aren't going to move us forward. And then the second thing that you do is just acknowledge right up front that you don't speak the same language. My favorite, my favorite example is when I was early in manufacturing, or I'm sorry, when I got into education early on, and I was giving a presentation to a number of K-12 educators about the importance of PLCs. Of course, we know in manufacturing that PLCs are programmable logic controllers, they are the computers of manufacturing inputs and outputs, and they're controlling all these complicated manufacturing and complex manufacturing processes, and we need to make sure that students understand the role of a PLC in a manufacturing process. And I gave this whole presentation, it was a lot of other things attached to that, but we were 10 minutes into the discussion before the educators realized that I was talking about a programmable logic controller, a PLC. They thought I was talking about professional learning communities, which is what they call PLCs. So the truth of the matter is that we have different words for different things, and we're gonna talk about things in manufacturing. Our educators aren't gonna understand, and they're gonna talk about things that we as manufacturing people may not understand. Just acknowledge up front that that's okay, that we don't necessarily speak each other's language, and all of a sudden some of those pretensions go down. I don't have to try to pretend that I'm an expert in education when I'm sitting in the school district conference room, and that educator doesn't have to pretend like they're an expert in manufacturing when they come into our plant. And what we found is that if we make the solutions and the discussions about communities and what's right for them and what's right for students and what's right for employers, and we have those conversations around those constituencies, all of a sudden we can open up all kinds of great discussions about what the future of partnerships between industry and education can look like.

SPEAKER_03 28:13

Outstanding. Right.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

That's uh Stephen Covey. And that's uh yeah, absolutely. Seek seek first to understand and then to be understood. And for as long as you brought that up, uh I was actually thinking about that the seven habits of highly effective people. I was thinking about that book a moment ago when you were talking about you know some of the paradigms that industrial employers have and why don't they get more engaged with industry. And one of the things that's in that book is understanding the four quadrant matrix matrix between um uh projects that are important, not urgent. So you have importance on one on one axis and urgent on the other. Partnering with your educators is important, not urgent. And in manufacturing, we're really good at solving problems, we're really good at putting out fires. That consumes our day. We need to make sure we're making time for those important, not urgent projects. When part of that is is is partnering with education. So interesting that you interesting that you and I were thinking about two different examples from exactly the same book as we were having this conversation. I love it.

SPEAKER_03 29:17

Well, so I wanna I want to get a little bit tactical and practical here, as a friend of mine used to say. If if you were a manufacturing leader today, what would you say your responsibility is beyond simply hiring some graduates and maybe griping about you know how they came to you? What what is what should good look like? You know, in manufacturing, we always have to have a standard. Let's talk about what good should look like for a manufacturing leader today, beyond just you know, hiring some graduates from the local K-12 or community college or whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

Absolutely. And I could we could do a whole podcast, probably three or four of them on that question, Sean. It's a great question, but let's cover a few things that they come to mind. What does good look like, or what does excellence look like in terms of an industrial and an education pathway? I'll start with a couple questions for for your uh for your listeners and your viewers who I know are many of them are involved directly in manufacturing. Number one, do you know the name and do you have a relationship with the president of your local community or technical college? So in your particular neighborhood, Western Dakota Technical College, great institution. So I would ask anybody in your neighborhood or any other neighborhood, do you know the name of the president of that institution? If not, that's a great place to start. Do you have a relationship with the superintendent of schools in your school district? Do you have a relationship with the person we call the CTE director? They may have a different title, but that's the person responsible for career and technical education in your particular school district. Do you know the principal at your local high school and do you know your tech ed teachers? And if the answer to those and STEM teachers too, if the answer to any of those questions are no, first of all, you're not abnormal and you're not alone because very few people can answer all of those questions, but that's a wonderful place to start. Reach out to those people, offer to go see them in their office, and then invite them to your facility, build a relationship with them. That's the first thing that I would say. Have you walked through your local technical education program and given those individuals some ideas about how they might be aligning to your technology in a way that's education appropriate? A lot of times industrial employers say, Well, I run a fill-in-the-blank CNC machine or machine tool. You need to do that in the manufacturer or in your tech ed program. And the answer to that is there's a lot about education that we may not appreciate in terms of curriculum, in terms of learning outcomes, and in terms of teacher training, in terms of certifications and equipment, all of those are important. If we just focus on the equipment, we miss a ton of opportunities. But making sure that the kinds of technologies that are important to you are reflected in your tech ed program. Same thing at your technical or community college. Are you on the advisory board? Are you walking in and presenting to those students once a semester? Are you bringing pizza to the students in the program that applies to the business that you're in? Are you funding both your technical college and your high school in a way that is meaningful to you and is meaningful to them? That can take a lot of forms. We have people that are putting literally a million, two million dollars into programs in their local high schools. Most of us don't have the wherewithal to do that, but you can do something and you can be involved and you can be supportive. So that's a really, really good place to start. Then we have to look internally and recognize that once we hire an individual, and it doesn't matter if it's from a technical college, it doesn't matter if it's from a high school, it doesn't matter if it's from somewhere else. The truth is that there's a lot of things they're gonna need to learn about our business. I remember running a metal fab department. We had a metal fab department in one of the companies that that we owned and and ran. And and we had hired a welder from a local community college, and our um our shop floor supervisor, our department head, I guess it was, walked into my office three days later and said, We're gonna fire that guy. I said, What why are you gonna fire him? He said, Well, well, he doesn't know how to weld. I'm like, Well, what do you mean he doesn't know how to weld? He's got an associate's degree from the local technical college. Of course he knows how to weld, it's in welding. And he the guy said, Well, well, he doesn't know how to do it our way. I'm like, well, where are you gonna find somebody that knows how to do it our way, right? I mean, that person doesn't exist. It's it's our way, apparently. So the the the real the point of it is we're gonna be doing things in our businesses that are different. You can't, it's not just turnkey. We have to be committed to training, we have to be committed to mentoring, we have to be training training our existing team members on how to be good mentors. We have to have really solid onboarding programs and recognize that it's probably a six-month to two-year commitment of bringing a new manufacturing person into our company and getting them to the point where they're really functioning the way that we need them to be functioning at a high level and getting them integrated into our culture. We could have a whole podcast on that as well. But I guess if if if I get my list, it's make sure you're engaged with your educators, you're understanding what they're teaching, telling them what you feel you need in terms of of the skills and competencies, and then be committed to lifelong learning for your incumbent workforce. All kinds of ways for people to do that. But those would be probably the top to top three or four items I would start with.

SPEAKER_03 34:13

Excellent. And I hope I hope folks, the good news is you can wind this back and and write that down. You don't want to chime in that you know, of course, Matt and his team, they work with some very large companies like Ashley Furniture, and when he talks about, you know, people making six, seven figure investments in some of these programs. I can promise you from personal experience, your local educator, would they love it if you wrote a million dollar check? I'm sure they would. But they'd be equally as thrilled, if not maybe even more so, if you said, you know, what what camps or off-campus activities do you have for your students? Could we host one of those? Could I could I have a couple of my younger engineers or maybe some folks from our manufacturing floor come in and and talk to, you know, your um industrial arts program or whatever the case may be. I promise you they will get just as fired up about those things. You don't have to write a million dollar check, and that is just as powerful of engagement as and frankly, you know, sometimes in this day and age it's easier for us to just try to, I call it engage with your checkbook when what they really need is your time, your insights, and the human contact with people from your company, not just another picture or some words that says, Hey, someday kids, you could have a job like this. Exactly. There's my encouragement, and that can fit within anybody's budget. Um I want to touch on another layer of this. We we got to it a little bit early on, but you know, Matt and his companies they do a ton in industrial uh settings as well, helping companies train up their workforce. So, Matt, what about your belief that companies need to invest in these people that they already have? Why is upskilling just as important as how we bring the new talent in or what new talent we bring in?

SPEAKER_01 36:04

Absolutely. Well, hearkening back to something we we discussed just a little while ago, Sean. If we think about who's going to be working in our businesses in 20 years, most of them are already in our companies today. And as we spend time, and you mentioned a couple of them, I mean, Ashley Furniture is a great partner of ours. They spend a lot of time around companies like Rockwell Automation, Kohler Company, Harley Davidson, uh the you know, the big three automakers. I mean, so we spend a lot of time with large companies and we spend a lot of time with small companies. I mean, we have clients in our in our client portfolio that are upskilling uh incumbent workers in manufacturing, and it's a company that's 10 or 15 people that are working in, for instance, a machining company, uh, lots and lots of examples like that. So it's not just something for the larger companies, it's something for for all of us. But it doesn't matter what kind of a business we're in, large or small, our technology is changing. And as I'm going into manufacturing facilities now and seeing you know companies that 10 years ago weren't didn't even have robotics or automation um on their you know on their um radar at all. Now we have companies that are you know using industrial robots and collaborative robots for machine tending and loading and unloading machining centers. I like the example of of machining because you know we have a lot of machining companies here in the Midwest. And I go into some companies and you look at and you look at their facility and they're like, yeah, we can't find any people. And then they've got a skilled machinist with you know 35 years of experience standing at a machining center loading and unloading, you know, metal blocks in and out of that machining center. And it's like, you know, there's some ways to automate that, and maybe that person's use, you know, highest and best use isn't just doing basic material handling. So there's a lot of ways to rethink those processes. We're starting to see more and more companies do that. We're starting to see um companies. I look, I look at at 3D printers that we see from from companies that that you're really involved with with Sean, and the the amount of data acquisition and the amount of smart sensors and smart devices that are embedded on those on those systems and the ability to do things at sc at scales we were never able to do before, and with materials that we were never able to use before, that's all innovation. And and what's happening now is that the re the rate of innovation, the speed of change in manufacturing is faster than it's ever been before. So we as industrial employers have to take and and recognize that we've got an obligation to our markets, to our customers, and certainly to our team members to make sure that the skills that they are learning are going to be continue to remain relevant. I think there's a lot of people that are looking at how quickly manufacturing technology is changing and saying, will I even have a job in five years? The answer to that is absolutely, if you're willing to learn. And that job may not look like it does today. In fact, it might even be safer, more interesting, and better paying, but you've got to be willing to equip yourself with the skills and competencies that'll be important in the future and your employer. Back to the idea of the industrial employers have to have an approach and a strategy around how they're gonna upskill their incumbent workers to make sure that those skills stay sharp.

SPEAKER_03 39:06

You know, I couldn't agree more. The only other log I'd put on that fire would be the concept of career path. Just because somebody takes a job in manufacturing, you cannot neglect the development of your people. You've got to have a path, a developmental path for those folks. And, you know, to exactly what you mentioned, Matt, you know, when you think about something in an added manufacturing business like sample printing, doing testing of incoming materials, et cetera, what would be the qualities you'd want? You'd be like, well, I need somebody that with a high degree of attention to detail that will do it the same way every time and is good at documenting their work. Well, where do I have those people? On my manufacturing floor. So, you know, we've we literally have people who are now growing and developing. They still, you know, they love using their hands and building things and all that, and that's fantastic, but they're also involved in our sample printing process. They're also in, again, they're doing testing of our incoming materials to ensure quality validation, et cetera. Um it's it's challenging. And and to your point, some of those jobs, you know, might be cleaner and pay better uh than what you used to do, but we've got to the workers have to be open to it, but the employers have to be showing a career path to their people that your human capital is the most important capital. You know, you can go to a bank and borrow more money, you can go to private equity, you know, there's tons of places you can go raise money. You can't overnight go get more human capital of the right quality. So you've you got to take care of what you have. Um so we've talked a little bit kind of through the industry lens and starting to talk about this bridge to an industry and education. I want to shift gears a little bit to the education side. You know, you've worked with some incredibly innovative schools. I've heard the stories firsthand from you and um your wife and other people on your team. What do you see as the common denominator when you would look across, you know, some of the people you'd consider to be not only thought leaders, but doing leaders, uh, which is a phrase I'm learning to adopt more and more. I think we get fascinated with thought leadership and posts on LinkedIn a little too much. And we need to look, as you said earlier, you know, people they care about your results. Uh, but what separates the institutions that are actually transforming and moving the ball down the field on this from those who are just standing still?

SPEAKER_01 41:24

Yeah, I think you touch on it as someone who, you know, fashions himself, meaning me, a thought leader, I guess, or at least I've been called one. I like that. I didn't mean to offend you with that. No, and I'm not the least of it offended. I like the idea of saying, all right, you need to be a thought leader, but that's fine. You need to be an action leader as well, right? I mean, you need to just to come up with really good ideas and put them on a podcast. Um, for sure, that has some value. But but what are you actively doing and how are you driving change? And I think that speaks to the the heart of your question, Sean, which is you know, what's the differentiator between let's take a school, a school district administrator or a superintendent that is really, really driving positive change in their in their district and in terms of what that looks like, implementing emerging technologies and having active conversations with their employers about what the future of education should look like, being willing to buck their school board or push back on their constituents a little bit because they're they're they see something in the future that's so important and a change in their in their organization, in their district, in their institution that is so important that they can't say no to that change. That to me is the number one influencer. And we did a study in one of our businesses about a year ago where we actually looked at the personality traits of the school district superintendents or leaders that were involved in large projects in which we were engaged that made a huge, huge difference. And when I'm talking about that, I'm saying, what does it look like when you bring drone technology or Mars rovers or really, really um innovative additive manufacturing or 3D scanning or autonomous vehicles or smart sensors and smart devices and manufacturing and bringing those kinds of programs into your high school or your middle school in a way that really shows your students that these are real technologies, that they can be active with them? And it's more than just learning how to, you know, control an RC car, remote control car, and say, oh, look at how I'm controlling this autonomous vehicle. What are the smart sensors? What are the smart devices? What are the vision systems? How are we using classification machine learning and supervised machine learning and unsupervised machine learning and reinforcement learning in that process and really diving deep into the technologies that, frankly, the superintendent, the district administrator probably doesn't even completely or even casually understand themselves. They just recognize that they need to be delivering that learning to their students. So we did the study that says what kind of district administrator, what kind of superintendent, principal, education leader is the kind that's going to lead that change. And there were a number of really, really interesting common denominators. Every single one of Them, number one, was willing to admit that they didn't know everything. They recognized that they had more to learn than they had to teach. And so they had they had to to to basically be a little bit vulnerable and say, look, I don't completely understand all these technologies, but I read about them and I see what's happening in the world. I want to make sure our students are prepared for that world that that that's coming was one thing. Uh another one was that they were all lifelong learners. They were all people that were committed themselves to learning throughout their career. They didn't graduate from a from a college program or earn a you know an ED uh degree or earn a master's degree and decide that they knew everything they needed to know to be successful in their endeavor. They recognized that they had a commitment to lifelong learning. All of them were willing to push back a little bit. I could tell you as someone who has worked really hard to disrupt the education, the world of education, there is a huge part of that machine that does not want to change. And it will tell you it doesn't want to change or it will tell you it wants to change, but then the actions behind what they told you tell you that they don't want to change. And so it's really, really challenging to drive change in not just in education, but in any institution where you have so many different personalities, so many different factions at play. And they have to be tenacious, they have to recognize that uh I'm gonna get after this thing, I'm gonna make it happen, I'm gonna have some hurdles that stand up in front of me, and I'm gonna knock those hurdles down or find a way around them, but we were gonna get that done. And those hurdles can come in the form of staff, of faculty, of parents, of uh district leadership in terms of school boards. They can come from a lot of different places, but all of those folks had a willingness to say, this is important for my students, this is important for my employers, this is important for my community, and I'm not gonna let somebody's desire to sit in the status quo be the reason that we don't move forward. So those are just a handful of things that we see, Sean, in leadership and in not just in school districts, community colleges, university chancellors across the board, even industrial workforce training programs. These are people that are willing to do things differently. That's hard work. It's not always easy. You're gonna get some criticism, you're gonna take some flack, but it's worth it if our if our real goal is to create amazing futures for our students and our communities.

SPEAKER_03 46:08

Well, I'm I'm super excited. I'm gonna tease one of our next episodes just a little bit, but uh, it's gonna be with the president of a leading science and engineering university, and he shared with me, you know, he was talking about this same like, hey, I've I'm gonna have to make some people mad to get get these changes made. They're not everyone's gonna be on board with this. And uh we were talking through some questions in our discovery call, and and I said, Well, there are two or three more that you know I could see making sense to talk about. And he said, Well, I'll have probably made enough people mad just with the ones you've already covered.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 46:40

Let's leave it, leave it at that for this episode.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

So I love it.

SPEAKER_03 46:43

Um, yeah, I you have to be willing to take some risks. I I don't care if you're leading a Boy Scout troop or a school district or a company, it's not a popularity contest. Not everybody's gonna like you. And if you can't get okay with that, you shouldn't be in the role. And you gotta look in the faces of your constituents, whether those are university students or K through 12 students, or in you know, in the case of a business owner, that's your employees, and you gotta do what you believe is best for them in the long run, um, even though they might not like it in the short term. So um another topic that you brought up that I thought was quite interesting is you talk about encouraging educators to go see what's working elsewhere instead of trying to reinvent the wheel on their own. Why why is that so important? And are you saying that there are some some uh wheels that have been invented that could be copied?

SPEAKER_01 47:39

For sure. And and I think you know that that that's a good lesson for educators, it's a good lesson for anybody that's driving change. You know, one of the things that we recognized in manufacturing is it was a lot easier to we said steal somebody's idea, but it was a lot easier to copy somebody's great idea yourself uh than to come up with something totally new. One of the things that I think we find in education, and it's probably not unique just to education, is people want to be unique. They want to feel like they did something nobody else did. They want to feel like they're they're driving something forward and and and paving a new trail that's never been paved before, a new road that's never been paved before. That's fine. We all want to do things our own unique way, and we can do that, but we can do that by learning what others have done and building on top of it. I think the biggest thing is that for for me to walk into a school board meeting, for me to walk into a chancellor's office at a university and say, here's what's possible, has one level of credibility, and they're gonna they're gonna understand and internalize that at one level. If they walk into another facility and they see a complete smart factory system that's running, that's got all kinds of additive technology on it, that's got smart conveyors that got that's got RFID and bike barcode readers, and it's got autonomous mobile robots moving around the facility. It's got all kinds of really advanced data acquisition equipment, and they see that firsthand and they talk to the person in that institution that has the same or similar job that they have. They start to open up and recognize what's possible. And I think a lot of times when we think about transforming, doesn't matter if it's a university engineering program, a technical college electromechanical program, or a high school technical education program, we get we get a little bit bound up in our own limitations of what we think is possible. So we spend a lot of time peop putting people in cars, in vans, in some cases on planes, and flying them all over to see what's possible. When we were envisioning some new programming here in my home state of Wisconsin about five or six years ago, you know, we took senior leadership of universities and technical colleges uh all over the Midwest. We took them to places like FANEC, the largest robotics company in the world, their U.S. headquarters in Detroit. We took them to places like Ammetrol and Jeffersonville, Indiana. We put them on a plane and went with them. We went all the way to Japan to look at some of the most advanced technologies that you would ever see. I saw, I spent a week in China last August with some educators looking at how China was approaching AI particularly and advanced technology education. And you get there and you see it with your own eyes, and it just is a whole different level of understanding what's possible and opening your mind up. So super, super um strong, strongly encouraging educators of all levels, whether it's with one of our companies and we'd love to have you, or with anybody else that walks in the door and says, Hey, let's go take a trip to another institution to see what they're doing. Accept that invitation, take the time to do it. What you'll be inspired to do, what you'll learn in the process, and what you'll open your mind up to is absolutely worth that trip.

SPEAKER_03 50:43

Fantastic advice. So I it's time to shift gears here to you know, you talk about sometimes people's tendency is to find a common enemy and just beat up on them. And probably the whipping boys and girls of all this tend to be the policy makers as often as anything. But policy does play an important role in how you know workforce rolls out. I mean, people talk about uh everything, you know, I'll go back to the whole student loan thing and say, well, if if the federal government didn't subsidize student loans, what would have happened there? Would the outcome have been different? And whether you like it or not, I think you'd have to agree the uh the answer to that would be yes. Um so you know, we again education has a role, industry has a role. Where does public policy fit into all of this? And maybe before you even answer that, just give us an example. I know Matt Matt works with policymakers from the local all the way to the national level, and maybe just give us a little glimpse into that before you dive into you know how you think public policy fits into solving this.

SPEAKER_01 51:45

Absolutely. Well, it it has a huge role in solving this without question. And that's one of the favorite things that that I do on the Tech Ed podcast. And you're a podcaster too. I mean, you you know how how much you learn from being um you know part of a podcast, having different guests come in, spending an hour or two every week having these conversations. Uh, we we're proud of the list of public policymakers that we've had join us on the podcast, Sean. We've had five governors, many members of Congress, lots of people doing great things at the state level, at the at the federal level in just the last couple years. Um, and just to give you a sense of the wide variety of different political views that we invite on the podcast and that we meet with. Um Haley Stevens, Congresswoman from the state of Michigan, um, you know, is a I would call her a centrist Democrat, but she's certainly to the left of the scale in terms of the political political scale. Tammy Baldwin, who's a senator from my home state of Wisconsin, has been on the podcast. Uh wonderful, wonderful conversation with with Tammy, uh, our governor Tony Evers, who's a Democrat. I see eye to eye with Tony on so many great things, and he's doing doing the right things for the right reasons. Um we've had tons of people from the other end of the sp of the political spectrum. Uh earlier this year, I had uh Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who's also the responsible for basically the for the National Energy Dominance Council, they call it at the federal level, member of the president's cabinet, good friend of mine who had joined us on the podcast. I sat down for dinner with a small group of people last August with uh House Speaker Mike Johnson, had a great conversation about particularly in that case what I had seen in China and what I thought it meant for for us here in the United States. Uh so we've had lots and lots of really good conversations with people involved in public policy. I will say um there's two, and there's it's probably a spectrum, right? So not everybody fits into one camp or the other, but you have you have people uh at the federal level, at the state level that want to be able to go out back to their constituents and said that I did something, um, be able to say that I did something, point to a bill that they sponsored or or voted in favor of, point to an initiative that they were involved in in terms of bringing capital or investment back to their home state at the federal level. Uh at the state level, we'll talk to governors who want to point to a specific grant program or point to a specific workforce development program that they have. Um, that's all awesome. And it's all really, really important. But they fit into one of two camps in my mind. And one camp is um, you know, we're doing this because we want to be able to tell our constituents we did something and make it much more likely that we get elected the next time. Or we're gonna do the hard work of really understanding what works. And number one, we're gonna make we're gonna make investments, and you can see like at the at the federal level now through the America's talent strategy, uh you know, that some of the investments the Trump administration is making. Say what you want about Donald Trump and and you know, I'll keep my opinions to myself because I we stay out of the politics. But the truth of the matter is, in my opinion, there's some great work that's being done in terms of apprenticeships, in terms of workforce pal, in terms of really specific projects that are being uh being led by the Department of Labor that I think are are really you know deserve deserve a tremendous amount of credit and deserve a tremendous amount of uh time in terms of people taking a look at how those investments are making a difference. So are we allocating the investments toward the areas where we think they're gonna make the most difference? And are we then measuring the results? You and I are both manufacturing guys. We recognize that what gets measured gets managed, what gets measured improves, and it's not just measuring on the front end, but what are the real results? How many people have we trained? How many of those individuals have gone into, for instance, advanced manufacturing? How many of them are have pursued pathways that they wouldn't have pursued otherwise or that are valuable in the workforce? And then, you know, to your earlier point, um, you know, are we avoiding some of the student debt that we've just absolutely burdened generations of Americans with? I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a week ago, and I'll end on this about uh individuals in their 60s who are still carrying tremendous amounts of student debt. And, you know, never mind the decisions they probably made around along the way that maybe weren't the best decisions. We graduated, my wife and I did with uh collectively some student debt. We got it all paid off in a relatively quick period of time. But the truth of the matter is that we've burdened a lot of people with debt that probably hasn't been repaid through ROI and the career choices that they had. So are we really measuring on the back end? Did that investment make a difference and did it accomplish the goals that we set out to have and that we set out when we initially put it in place? Really, really important things to think about with regard to public policy.

SPEAKER_03 56:19

Yeah, I'll call out an example from South Dakota. So our former governor Dennis Dugard, one of the one of the it was a simple, but in my opinion, powerful policy move. One of my favorite things he did is he put in place truth in labeling of college degrees. So before you could sign up to study a certain degree, the university had to disclose here's what it's gonna cost you to get this degree, and here's what the average wage of someone with that degree is. So here's what the ROI looks like, you know, we require that on our food. You know, if I'm gonna go buy a uh, well, I was gonna say 99 cents, but boy, that was a long time ago. If I'm gonna go buy a $4 Big Mac, they have to tell me, give me the nutrition information on that Big Mac. But if I'm gonna make a hundred thousand dollar decision about college investment, I could do that and be pretty oblivious um, you know, to what the ROI might be. And so I think there are, you know, there are things like that that go a long way. Um, I'm I want we've done a little bit of look in the mirror for the industry leaders and what does good look like on the education side. I want to hit you with the same question on the policy side because you do deal with so many of these folks. What do you see that separates the people who are really moving workhorse development forward from the ones that, you know, might just be looking for the sound bite? How do we, if there's a policy leader who happens to be listening to this, you know, what does good look like for them?

SPEAKER_01 57:42

So uh, you know, I would start with, you know, you think about you're you're a mission-driven business, and one of the reasons that I was drawn to, you know, the partnership that we have with with your company, Sean, you, you know, you several years ago is that you, as I started out saying on this podcast, on this episode, you're the kind of person that I want to work with. You're mission-driven, you're doing it for the right reasons. We kind of look at it the same way in the education technology business. Our companies are what we say dedicated to securing the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. That is our mission. Everything that we do comes back to that mission is more important than any other measurement that we that we track is how many lives are we changing on a week in and week out basis. That is more important than EBITDA, that is more important than revenue, it's more important than anything else that we do. And and I would say that you can tell a lot of times the public policymakers that are genuinely mission-driven, in part by the kinds of questions that they ask when you meet with them. And are they asking questions that are about them or are they asking questions about you? Are they asking questions that are designed to just, you know, basically gloss over the surface, or are they getting really, really deep? Are they asking you the kinds of questions about, you know, what challenges are you facing in the workforce? Why are you facing those challenges? What could we be doing differently? And then they're taking back policy and legislation to wherever it is that they started and are working and crafting that policy and legislation around the real problems that we're facing inside the workforce. And and then a lot of it is, you know, if you're doing things for the right reason, you're not, you know, we don't care if we get the sale in our businesses, right? And I say that in people like, right? You really don't care if you sell it. I'm like, if it's right for the school, if it's right for the community, if it's right for their employers, if it's right for their students, then that customer is going to buy from us because it's right for them. But if they decide that for whatever reason what we have to offer isn't aligned with their goals as an organization, then they shouldn't buy from us. And we won't feel bad about not getting the order because we couldn't help them. We need more of that thinking on the public policy side. And there are certainly plenty of people that are working in government, working in policy for the right reasons, but they're doing it not just so they can get re-elected in two or four or six years, they're doing it so that they can genuinely make a difference in their communities. And you can kind of tell the people after spending not too much time with them, the ones that are just in it for the next round of votes, or the ones that are in it to make their communities a better place. And so we need more of the latter. I think we need many more of the latter. And so the more individuals that we can get into policy and politics that have a genuine interest in improving their communities and do it for that reason, the better off we're all gonna be.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:16

Couldn't couldn't have said it better than that. You know, one of the things I love about this issue, if we want to call it an issue of workforce, is it should be a uniting issue, right? And all the places I've traveled around the world from Europe to Asia, etc., you know, I always tell people the biggest thing I've learned is that we are more alike than we are different. You know, there everybody wants to be able to be safe where they live. They want to be able to see their kids have an opportunity to do better than they did. You know, they want to have an opportunity to do something that is challenging and fulfilling to them. Well, that requires good jobs. To get people into good jobs, they have to have the right skills. I mean, this is a a topic that should be able to unite us all. And I love the way you frame using this. You know, we talk about, hey, look, forget the politics, forget the paradigms. If our agenda is get the best people we can into our company, which when I meet with an educator, you know, I I've gotten to the point where I like to just put my agenda right on the table to begin with and say, look, here's my selfish motivation. I want the best people I can get who are best suited to the kind of jobs I have to offer. So if they're great people but not suited, don't want them. Or if they're suited but not great people, don't want them. That's my agenda. And, you know, it's a little bit disarming that all of a sudden, like, I don't have to wonder what this guy's thinking. Here's what he's after. Ultimately, we've got to get everybody convinced and aware that they've got God-given gifts and talents that they can go use and then help them figure out how to slot those in to the you know, I'll call it global economy, but that that doesn't that might be in a teaching role, that might be in a not-for-profit role, or that might be bolting 3D printers together. Uh so I we've touched on a couple of things. We talked about in industry, you know, if I'm Ashley Furniture, it might be I can do all kinds of things, and if I'm the small guy, it's harder to think about. And I, you know, I shared a couple of examples of things that we've done here at B9 Creations that have have uh partnered with local education institutions. You had a couple of great stories to share, Matt, and and I think our audience would be just as interested. But when so oftentimes in in educational institutions, be it tech ed or or K through twelve, it's like, well, we're just a little school district. You know, we're not we're not Madison, Wisconsin, or we're not Dallas, Texas. But you shared a story with me in our discovery call about Mike Bigley from Whitehall. Um, would you be willing to share that with our audience?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:48

I'd be happy to. And I should say I haven't worked in Dallas, Texas, but I have worked in Sioux Hall, South Dakota. I have worked in Madison, Wisconsin. So some great examples of of larger districts that you know maybe have the wherewithal that some of the smaller districts at least think that they don't have. But I would love to share the story of Mike Bigley, one of my best friends in in all of education, been working with Mike for a number of years. Uh Whitehall, Wisconsin. If you haven't heard of it, you're not alone because it's not a big metropolis, as Sean mentions. Um I think their population it varies a little bit year to year, maybe 1,500, 1,600, and yet one of the most innovative school districts that I've worked with anywhere. Um, you know, Mike decided eight years ago, and I'm sharing these stories with his permission. We've we've had these conversations and he's talked about these things publicly. He was tired of getting, you know, kicked in the rear end, if you will, and and I've heard him use more more colorful language than that by his by his local um by his local employers. And he and he just decided, look, rather than just being a punching bag when somebody can't uh you know, can't find a person that they want to work in their manufacturing facility, or when they feel like we're not producing the kind of talent that they need, or they just want to complain about the next generation of people coming out of a K-12 program or a K-12 district. He said, We're gonna be active in making the change. We're gonna ask some tough questions, we're gonna have some tough conversations, and we're gonna be willing to shake up our district. And, you know, I initially worked with Mike on what was called the Mobile Skills Lab. It was a um a basically a trailer, uh a semi-trailer that expanded into a 600, 900, I should say, square foot classroom where students were learning about electric relay control, motor control, basic ACDC, programmable logic controllers, 3D and CAD modeling, 3D and additive manufacturing, uh, robotics, automation, and so on. Um and that was a really cool innovative project now, some eight or nine years ago when we implemented it. Since then, um we partnered on what's called the Emerging Technologies Lab. And this is a lab where in the first semester we put all those kinds of technologies we talked about earlier: autonomous vehicles, um, autonomous mobile robots, uh, 3D design and fabrication, additive manufacturing, uh, every every what we call edge to cloud continuum or AI-driven technology you can think of. We created a, and I say we, I don't take any credit for it. His district created this emerging technologies lab with the help of several employers and donors, not the least of which is the Ron and Joyce Wannick Foundation, and uh and basically created an environment where students can come and experiment with emerging technologies. And in the first semester, I'm gonna be close on the numbers that we were hoping we get 100 students to sign up for that uh that particular lab. Semester one, 430, semester two, five hundred, then they opened it up to surrounding school districts and literally had 1,700 students going through um going through that emerging technologies lab. If the numbers don't quite work in a town of sixteen hundred people, in some cases those were students going to that lab multiple class hours in a day because they wanted to experience that technology. So Mike was somebody that was willing to say, look, we're not gonna let the fact that we're a rural western Wisconsin. School districts stand in the way of opportunities for our students. We want to show them what's here, but we want to show them the world as well. And we want them to understand how these emerging technologies and the edge of the cloud continuum fit into their everyday life and fit into the future. Was willing to have those tough conversations with employers, seek their advice, not their money. If you want to have a million dollars, you need to have a million dollar idea. If you ask for money, you'll get advice. And if you ask for advice, you'll get money. So if he would tell educators, if you ask for money, you'll get advice. If you ask for advice, you'll get money. In other words, you got to build that relationship and come up with a million dollar idea. Mike did. He secured investments in that range, and it's just been doing amazing things for students and communities. So just a great example, as we talked about earlier, Sean, of somebody who's willing to innovate, disrupt the education model a little bit, push back on folks that are saying this won't ever work. And now Mike's doing some incredible work. I'll actually plug in an organization that we're tangentially involved in, but not directly involved in. It's just work that Mike is doing with what he calls liftoffs. You can Google that and check it out. And what they're doing there in terms of AI-driven, student-centered learning and adaptive learning that meets every student where they are. So a student that like your son is a hands-on kinesthetic learner, like I was a hands-on kinesthetic learner, can learn in that way. And maybe another student who's more of a classroom learner, traditional learner, can learn in that fashion. So he's doing some some amazing work in that district and deserves tremendous credit. I appreciate you asking about him.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:25

Very cool. Um so I want to close up with a topic that, you know, for some of you who are our listeners, and you might be a hardcore additive manufacturing technical, you know, professional, some of this may not, you may have thought, ah, I'm not sure how that relates. We we're gonna talk for a minute. If you are a parent or if you are uh anyone who anticipates having a child at some point in the future, again, because Matt brings such an interesting perspective here. If you could give one piece of advice to parents who are trying to help their kids navigate this concept of career, et cetera, in today's world, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:07

Well, I think you have to be open to all the different options that are available to your to your to your children. I'm not just a self-proclaimed thought leader in the world of technical education. I'll let your audience decide whether that title is valid or not. But I'm also a parent, and I've got two children that are now in their mid-20s, but you know, seven, eight, nine years ago, they were making decisions, and in some cases we make those decisions as early as middle school about what they wanted to do. And our advice to our kids was, and this is my advice to parents, is that you have to recognize that what your vision or your paradigm of what comes after high school is may not be the best or the most valuable paradigm for your child. So what I wanted for my kids was two things. Number one is I want to have you find a job that you think is rewarding that can support your lifestyle, that's in an area that you have interest in. And number two, I want you to not have to move back and live in the basement when you're done with whatever comes after high school. And I joke that it's it's really in reverse order. Number one is I want you to not come home and live in the basement. Number two, I hope I hope you like your job and that it supports your lifestyle. Kidding, of course, on that second part. But the truth of the matter is in the end, those were the things that were important to my kids or important to me with regard to my my kids. Find that job that matches what you want to do, what's important to you and can support the lifestyle you want to have. In this day and age, that can look a lot of different ways. It's not necessarily, in fact, in many cases, it's not a four-year degree program. And we do have a lot of disruption happening in that space as well. Separate podcast on its own, but you know, there are a lot of innovative things happening in the four-year universities, but that may or may not be the best path for a young person. Consider technical and community college and consider uh going direct to workforce, consider going into our nation's uh national defense and military, very, very important. Consider all of these different options. And by the way, none of those options for your children are lifetime decisions. They're just a decision they made now. And now with all the opportunities for lifelong learning, for third-party certifications, for different learning pathways, we have all kinds of on-ramps and off-ramps. You can go to a technical college program, go back to the work, go into the workforce a few years later, decide that you want to complete your complete a four-year degree and take as much credit as you can from your prior learning into a four-year degree program. So none of these are lifelong terminal decisions. They're not permanent decisions. It's what you're going to do and what's best for you now. And there is a tremendous amount of pride in any one of those decisions. We have students that are going through, for instance, um one semester career programs in high school around advanced manufacturing and automation, robotics, earning a certification. And we've had students graduate from high school and the next day they're going into a manufacturing job that's paying them $70,000, $80,000 a year. No debt. Their new employer will support their learning environment and support their learning over the course of time. If they want to study after work or on their own time in terms of going to a technical or community college, working on a four-year degree, that opportunity is available to them. But they are getting great jobs right out of high school in advanced manufacturing. And so I would be proud of my kid, whether they decided to go direct to workforce or did a four-year degree or went into the military or what have you. Um, all of those options are available. We have to make sure that we're making our students and our young people aware of what those options are. And as a parent, the best thing you can do is educate your student on those options, educate your child on those options, and then get out of the way and make the decision, let them make the decision that's right for them.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:38

So I have one follow-up because you had shared something with me that was it was an eye-opener to me. So I have I have two kids. My daughter's about to graduate from Arizona State in December. My son, as I shared, chose to go right to the workforce. Um, so I've been through that path, but something that you've learned from educators that you shared, you know, and I think I I'm asking you to share this because as industry partners, it's like, yeah, I probably need to hire some people. Let me talk to the kids in, let me go in April and talk to the kids graduating in May. Um, well, if that's if that's the kind of time horizon you're operating on, you will have missed anyone except for maybe the kid or two who just woke up in class and doesn't know what they're doing. But you made a point that said career exploration has got to start much earlier than people realize. When is that and why does that matter so much?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:31

Absolutely. So, and it surprised me when I learned this, but there's a tremendous amount of research out there now on this topic. And number one is you're exactly right, Sean. We, you know, I used to sit in meetings with employers, and they're like, we have to get the juniors and seniors in high school excited about careers in manufacturing. That's way too late. Young people make decisions or at least start making decisions much, much earlier than that, in some cases as early as middle school. And what's interesting is that there's a huge gender difference here. So uh girls start thinking about career decisions earlier than boys, and and certainly fifth, sixth graders when they're starting to think about what they might want to be when they grow up. And we're generalizing, generalizing here, of course, but start thinking about what they want to do when they when they grow up after high school. And it's not so much that they're deciding what they want to do. They're not saying, I want to be a nurse, I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a doctor. Instead, they're saying, you know, engineering, manufacturing, those are more jobs for boys. That's not something that that I think uh is available to me. And once you've lost them, they're not coming back. Once they've decided in middle school at age 11 or 12 that they don't want to be in manufacturing at age 18 or 19, they're not gonna come back and make that decision. At least it's very unlikely that they will. We'll couple that. That's the what's one study that was completed. Um, couple that with with something, another study that was done by Dr. Casey Sack Sachs, now uh with the U.S. Department of Education. But at the time she told me about this, she joined us on the podcast. She was the president of um Bridge Bridgeville Technical College in um in West Virginia, and she did a study of middle school students, and what she found was that the average middle school student, Sean, could name 12 career pathways that were available to them. Now, by any measure, depending upon how you couple them or how you look at them, there's somewhere between a thousand and twenty five hundred different career paths that a student could choose after high school, and the average middle school student was aware of 12 of them. Well, guess what? If young people are making decisions as early as 11 or 12 years old, and they're only looking at 12 of the career pathways or aware of them, and it's typically what you know, what their parents do or what their friend's parents do, or a fireman or a policeman, or the checkout person at the grocery store, the people that they interact with every day, a teacher or a principal, those are the career pathways they're aware of. Think about all the career pathways they're not aware of. And if they're deciding as early as middle school what they might want to do, is it any wonder that we're having a hard time finding people into advanced manufacturing if they're not getting that education and that exposure while they're 11, 12, 13 years old? So you're exactly right. Going in April or May of that senior year of high school and saying, come to manufacturing, you're picking from a pretty, pretty small talent pool. Let's get them excited about these amazing careers when they're in middle school. Not that every single one of them should be in advanced manufacturing, but they need to be aware that that's a career that they could have, and that's why we start when they're 11 or 12 years old.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:26

Outstanding. Matt, I want to say thank you again. You know, from the first time that I met you, Renee, and started to get to know the rest of the team. I'm continuously reminded of why we chose to put in the time to figure out how to do business together. And I look forward to more of that in the years ahead.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:41

Well, likewise, Sean, I'm incredibly proud of our relationship. You're absolutely a thought leader with the advantage, the additive advantage and more. You're also an action leader to our earlier discussion, and I admire that. It's not, it's it's one thing to think about it. It's another thing to live these values and these missions out in your business life, in your personal life, and the way that you share stories with your audience. You're doing incredible work. It was an honor to be able to spend a little bit of time with you, and I really appreciate you inviting me to be on.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:09

What a fascinating conversation. It actually, so many points surprised me and got me thinking about this workforce problem in a different way. And one thing that really stood out to me was Matt's point about what manufacturers think they're telling educators and what educators are actually hearing. You know, this idea of soft skills, and by that it's will they show up and have a good work ethic has been this repeated mantra, um, which is probably not exactly what manufacturers are aiming for. Why do you think that message has become so prevalent and common? And what should manufacturers be communicating to these educators uh to prepare the workforce they're looking to hire?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:49

Well, I think Matt did a great job highlighting how many of us uh have fallen back into a little bit of overwhelm in this area, Danny, I think, where from all of I'm just I'll use the word chaos, but I probably shouldn't use that word, but kind of going on in K through 12 education to, you know, the university world where this, you know, student loan crisis and all these things, it's easy as a a manufacturing leader to step back and say, Oh, I'm not even sure where to plug into all that. Please just send me people that aren't on drugs and you know we'll show up. Um as Matt mentioned. And you know, his challenge, and it's the right answer, is that if we want more, and when we get behind closed doors, we all gripe and moan that we want more, right? Um we're gonna have to engage and develop partnerships to help you know the folks on the education end, be it K through 12, technical college, or four-year university, uh, deliver the students or in this case, workforce that we need. And you know, Matt's point about um you know, you can't sit back and wait for it to magically happen. You're gonna have to go engage and listen. Uh we had a neat little conversation there around the whole Stephen Covey uh seek first to understand and and then to be understood. Um I think it's I can imagine, because I've never been one, but I can imagine it's very difficult to be an educator. Um, you know, heads up, we're gonna have stay tuned because we've got some episodes coming up with, you know, you heard Matt talk about being disruptive. We've got some educators who are gonna uh say things and and be willing to shake things up in a way that you don't normally hear educators do. Um but as business leaders, we're the ones that are supposedly innovative, fast moving, and all these things. We've got to get in there and engage and be a partner, not just show up with a list of demands, but show up saying, Hey, what is it like to walk a mile in your shoes? And before I ask for anything, what are the challenges you're dealing with as you're trying to, I think we're aligned because you want to get these people successfully into the career field. I want to welcome them there. How do we get those agendas to meet in the middle? Um, but it's got to be an active engagement. It can't be, you know, passively waiting for something magical to fall into your lap.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:13

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I I I love that instead of why can't you produce talent? It's it's this idea of what are we doing to help create talent? You mentioned one practical way to engage was just uh this idea of let me seek first understand, let me listen to your challenges. What are some other practical ways companies can start to become part of that solution?

SPEAKER_03 1:19:31

Well, I think it's you know, and our approach here has always been it's one thing for me to go to some superintendent's office or sit on the industry advisory board of, you know, a department of at the South Coast School of Mines, things like that, which I do, but for me to go there and try to help them understand what we need, much more effective if you can bring those folks to your environment. And, you know, as Matt challenged, like when you have them show up, maybe have it look like someplace people would actually want to work. Um, you know, you can't expect to lead them into a dark cave filled with poisonous vapor and say, oh, yeah, we definitely want to send our graduates here. But, you know, we've we've done things, and I mentioned this in the uh in the episode, but I think oftentimes it's discouraging for our smaller employers who think, well, I, you know, gosh, I can't write them a, they want me to write them a million dollar check or even a ten thousand dollar check. That may seem like a ton of money, but what if you, you know, as we did partnering with uh uh with some of our local education leaders, you know, hosting a day of one of their summer biomed camps here and having, you know, frankly, when those people come and get in a room, they'd rather hear from some of our younger engineers than somebody with as much gray hair as I have. And I think that's great. It gives our some of our younger employees the opportunity to get in there and you know, pay it forward to that next generation. So looking for tangible things, I promise, if you go to your local uh education leaders, or you know, if you want to get more specific, you go to the career and tech ed people and you say, tell me about all the things you're trying to do this year so I can find an opportunity to help. After the awkward hug ins, I bet they'll have an ask that is totally manageable for you. And it's just it's getting in there and engaging and again, inviting people to come to your place. When we have this, we've got a university president who will be on the podcast again. I think you're gonna want to hear that episode. You know, he he said, Hey, I've never been to your facility. Could I come take a tour? Absolutely. You know, come an hour early, we'll we'll do the tour, the whole thing. Um, their ability to meet your need is so much heightened when they understand where you're at.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:46

Mm-hmm. I love that. Um, I I wanted to switch gears a little bit too, because something that really shocked me is some of the statistics that Matt was throwing out. Like 75 to 80 percent of the workforce you'll have 20 years from now is already working for you. And that startled me. You know, how how do you think, how should that change maybe the way manufacturing leaders are thinking about workforce development and investing in their current workforce while in parallel doing the things you're talking about to develop new workforce?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:14

Yeah, I think it's it's very easy to become myopic in either direction. And especially when you're you know, when you're in an organization where you may not have an entire learning and development department. You know, when I worked at Schneider Electric, we had a whole team of people that that did nothing but strategize about how we're progressing people through job bands and all these things. When you're in a company like I am today, I don't have a whole team of people working on that. But especially in this age of AI, you can have a virtual, you know, chief people officer that helps you strategize. And the more you tell it about the people you have, I think the key is again, you can't be all about how do I get this new batch of talent into the organization. Your other biggest risk of failure long term as a business is what if all your employees stay but don't grow? If you're not growing and developing the employees you have, well, you'd better hope your customers don't ask for anything different than whatever you're doing today because you won't be able to deliver it well. And you know, that whole concept of a career path, I think it's where a lot of people get disillusioned with their career. They get out of school, the companies are excited to have them, they came, they recruited them, all these things, and then you get into your job, maybe you get a promotion, and then you sort of become forgotten. And that's when I think people are like, you know, geez, should I go hike the Appalachian Trail or whatever? This isn't too fulfilling. I think we've got to find ways beyond, you know, ping-pong tables or beer in the fridge at the office to keep people engaged in their career. And really it's as simple as understanding what do they want, how can you help them, and I don't mean, you know, some collection of Star Wars figures, but what do they want from their career and how can your company help them achieve those things in a way that benefits your company and your customers? If you think about that Venn diagram, this whole concept of career pathing goes from complex to pretty simple.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:18

Yeah. There's a leadership element internally, and then you also spent quite a bit of time talking with Matt about leadership externally. We we've talked about this intersection, I'll call it, or partnership between educators and manufacturers, but you have policymakers in here, you have other manufacturers, you have organizations that are dedicated to trying to make progress in this area. What characteristics do you think separate organizations that actually move the needle on this workforce conversation versus ones that just maybe keep talking about it but stay stuck?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:50

You know, I think it's the the ones, you know, we had this conversation about thought leader versus action leader. And to Matt's point, hopefully you're doing both, right? If you're always taking action, you don't think about it, that's probably not gonna be real value add. But it's being willing to engage. And and maybe you go, you do put on a STEM camp or something, and at the end of it, you look at the folks you partnered with, you're like, huh, that didn't go the way we thought it was gonna go. We need to do that differently next year. Um, you know, the only way to never make a mistake is don't do anything. You've gotta be willing to engage and go take some actions and know, no different than in your business, they aren't all gonna work perfectly. You're gonna have to be willing to adjust and you know, helping your employees understand, you know, like we've got employees here at B9 that work really hard to give back to that next generation um, you know, by hosting camps or speaking on campuses or mentoring, all these things. And is every one of those relationships, you know, a home run or every one of those interactions a home run? It's not. But if you're out there with an attitude of I'm gonna learn how to serve, you know, my policymaker partners, my education partners, and my other industry partners, you know, fundamentally in life, the best way to get what you want is help other people get what they want.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:10

Yeah, I love that. I think that's a a good place to come to our final question that we like to ask every time. You know, if you were a manufacturing leader and you're taking this entire episode in and you want to walk away with one action item, what's the first thing you would encourage them to do over the next six months to strengthen their workforce pipeline?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:27

You know, to me it comes down to identifying who are the other stakeholders that can help me get my need met. And, you know, as I mentioned in the conversation with Matt, being very open about whatever that need or agenda is, and then buy those people lunch, buy them coffee, go to their office, you know, showing up in the public comment uh time at a school board meeting, probably not the ideal place to uh, you know, to go uh begin that relationship or you know, community college board meeting, whatever the case may be, but start to build a relationship. Build some relationship first, then your ability to influence thinking will go way up.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:13

I love that. I think you could apply that to the other four questions I asked you today as well. So that's a that's a great spot to end.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:18

That's funny how that works in every area of life.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:21

Um the other, if I could chime in with one other thing, it's just Matt shared some great stories of people in you know relatively rural uh education institutions. Same can be said for you know companies. Don't let where you're located or people's perception of the industry that you're in or any of those things stop you from pouring water on the seeds of your business. And that's really what talent attraction and talent development is. Those are the seeds that grow your business. And don't let you know being located in South Dakota or Wisconsin or something like that cause you to think, oh geez, if only we were in California or if only we were in Texas or if only we were somewhere else. Um that may be January in South Dakota or Wisconsin, you might think that, but um don't be afraid to go out and engage and and take some risks in this area.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:12

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:15

Matt, thank you again so much for joining us today. One thing I took away from this conversation is that solving this workforce challenge isn't about finding a single silver bullet. It's about creating stronger connections between us as industry, our education partners, and our policymakers. The encouraging part is that every manufacturer, regardless of size, can play a role in this, whether it's mentoring students, partnering with your local school district, investing in your current employees, engaging with your local technical college, or simply changing the conversation from complaining about the talent pipeline to actually helping build it. There are practical steps every organization can take. Thanks a ton for sharing your perspective and your experience and the work that you're doing to help shape the next generation of manufacturing talent.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:04

Thanks again for joining us for this episode of the Additive Advantage Podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube and connect with us on LinkedIn so you never miss a new episode. Until next time, keep building, learning, and finding your additive advantage.