Manufacturers, educators call for better cooperation to train more employees

By STEPHEN BEALE Union Leader Correspondent

BEDFORD -- New Hampshire has a shortage of workers who are properly trained and educated for manufacturing jobs, according to business leaders and educators at a summit at the Wayfarer Conference Center yesterday.

Manufacturing accounts for one of every seven jobs and $1 of every $5 in payroll in the state, according to University of New Hampshire Professor Ross Gittell, but employment in the sector has declined from 14 percent of total employment in 2002 to 12 percent this year.


Part of the problem, several officials said yesterday, is a lack of qualified applicants for the available jobs.


"It's hard to find trained people to hire," said Dr. Mike Shipulski, director of engineering for Hypertherm, Inc. in Hanover.


Shipulski said his company usually has 25 open machine operator positions at any given time. He said Hypertherm often collaborates with recruitment firms to train potential applicants.


Skip Marsh, an engineer with V A Cleaning Systems, agreed. He said manufacturing companies must invest a significant amount of effort to train new employees. It takes six months to two years, he said, to make a return on that investment.


Stephen Reno, chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire, said the problem could be addressed through closer ties between the business community and state colleges and universities.


"We have to be working hand in glove with the manufacturing sector so we have a better sense of what they need," Reno said in an interview. He said that state colleges need to produce graduates with the technical skills, work habits and values necessary to perform in manufacturing jobs.


The meeting yesterday, which officially was known as the Governor's Manufacturing Summit, featured more than a dozen speakers on topics ranging from effective leadership to innovative accounting systems.


Reno said the overall theme was improving organization by changing the culture inside and outside manufacturing companies.


Shipulski said he changed the culture at his company by breaking down the wall of separation between designers and builders. He said designers realized their product machines that cut metal had an unnecessarily high number of parts when they were built.


More than 70 percent of the parts in the machines, known as laser arc cutting systems, were either fasteners or connectors. The systems also had 34 labels. "I said, 'Isn't that 33 too many?'" Shipulski said. Shipulski told company designers they had to scale down the number of parts by half. That requirement, he said, reduced the cost of purchasing the parts by 38 percent and the amount of time it took to put them together by 89 percent.


"How can we produce what we produce more efficiently, more effectively, and more responsibly to the needs of the market?" Reno said. "That same question seems to be one we should also be asking in higher education." There is room for improvement, Reno said, but the state university system already is taking several steps in the right direction. He said a subcommittee of the board of trustees recently requested meetings with representatives of the state universities to assess their existing partnerships with businesses.


During his keynote address, Reno called for an expansion of those partnerships and a more aggressive recruitment of high school and international students.


The summit, now in its fourth year, was founded to highlight the economic significance of manufacturing, according to David Juvet, vice president of the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire, one of three sponsors. "We felt that manufacturing, which was really a critical component of the New Hampshire economy, was getting overlooked," Juvet said.


The event also was sponsored by the New Hampshire Business Resource Center, a state agency, and the New Hampshire Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Gov. John Lynch delivered the opening remarks.