With an upturn comes the risk of skills shortages.
There are few truly unskilled jobs in current manufacturing and the process of learning takes time. Good supervisory and management skills are often in short supply. Therefore we suggest this upturn represents a good time to be thinking about future needs. With one in five young people feeling they have no future, there are human resources available to feed in to your production needs.
It is tempting to look towards colleges, funding grants and apprenticeships to develop skills. All of these are valuable but have limitations. External training providers generally provide only generic skills. Adapting those skills to what is needed in the specific context of an individual business is largely the employer’s responsibility.
Training is often looked on as a cost. But there are many forms of training where the costs are essentially contained within otherwise normal production expenditure. Utilising mentoring, introducing topics in meetings, training on an idle production line all represent opportunities without any short term effect on the bottom line. Thinking laterally can pay dividends in the longer term.
Planning is always wise and personal development plans for managers and supervisors can include training skills so they can train other levels; including those young people.