The Monthly Workforce Newsletter of the Council of Industry
October 5, 2023
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WKIP to Broadcast Live from DCC’s New Mechatronics Lab on Mfg Day, October 6th – Tune In!
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The Council of Industry will once again team up with WKIP’s Hudson Valley Focus Live to Celebrate National Manufacturing Day October 6th. The Broadcast will be live from Dutchess Community College’s New Mechatronics Lab located at the College’s Fishkill Campus. The broadcast will take place from 6:00 AM – 9:00 AM and will include guests from education, economic development, government and the manufacturing industry.
Celebrated nationally on the first Friday in October, MFG Day is manufacturing’s biggest annual opportunity to inspire the next generation, positively shift perceptions about our industry, and build the foundation for the manufacturing workforce of the future. Mfg Day helps us end the misperceptions of modern manufacturing and present the sector as a viable career path in our region.
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HV Mfg Fall 2023 Edition in Production
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Ad Essentials and Maar Printers are hard at work putting the finishing touches on the fall 2023 edition of HV Mfg with publication expected in Mid-October. This edition features our Leader Q&A with Unshattered’s Kelly Lyndgaard and a profile of long time Council of Industry member Balchem Products. Other articles include a look at how demographic shifts in the region will affect the workforce, cybersecurity best practices, schools and industry partnerships in the region, and some book reviews and recommendations from some of our members and friends. The magazine will also feature news briefs and a resource guide for members.
Keep an eye on your inbox and your mailbox for your copy.
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Annual Luncheon & Expo November 17th – FBI Cybersecurity Expert to Keynote, Leadership Certificate Recipients Recognized
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The Council of Industry’s Annual Luncheon & Member Expo will be held on Friday, November 17th at the Grandview in Poughkeepsie, NY. The Event will open with the Member Expo beginning at 11:15. The Luncheon program begins around noon with the presentation of Manufacturing Leadership Certificates to more than 40 individuals who have completed the program since last year’s event.
Lunch and a Keynote address from Michael Pollice Special Agent Strategic Partnership & Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC) Coordinator. DSAC is a public-private partnership offered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Office of Private Sector and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis that enhances communication and promotes the timely and effective exchange of security and intelligence information between the federal government and the private sector.
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Jackson Lewis to Deliver a Labor and Employment Regulatory and Legislative Update Webinar for Council Members October 12th
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Recent legislative and regulatory actions by New York State and the Federal Government are redefining the employee employer relationship with several intended to make it easier for labor unions to organize employees and more difficult for employers to communicate their position. On October 12th, the Council of Industry will host a frank discussion with attorneys Thomas McDonough and Robert Guidotti from Jackson Lewis PC, a Council Associate Member, on the changes to NLRB procedures and union organizing trends as well as recently enacted state laws on "captive" meetings.
This program is for members only.
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Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Course at DCC Fishkill Starts October 17th – Six Seats Left
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The Council of Industry is pleased to partner with New York State, Dutchess Community College, SUNY Orange and RIT to deliver a Yellow Belt training to be held October 17, 18 & 19 at Dutchess Community College’s Fishkill campus. Yellow belt is an approach to process improvement that merges the complementary concepts and tools from both Six Sigma and
Lean approaches. During this interactive Yellow Belt training, each group of participants will identify opportunities within their respective work areas and ways to improve those areas utilizing taught problem solving tools. The teams will present their identified work area opportunity and suggested solutions.
They will be introduced to the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control improvement process and some of the tools associated with each stage.
The following topics will be focused during the training:
- 5-S and Visual Controls
- Team Building
- Resistance to Change
- Problem Solving Process
- Statistical Thinking
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Periodically the Council of Industry will share profiles of individuals who have applied for, or expressed an interest in, a job in Hudson Valley manufacturing.
Other Council members can contact Johnnieanne Hansen directly for additional candidate details or to learn more about the recruiting initiative.
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Position Interest: Engineering Technician
Education: Bachelor of Science – Electric Engineering
Level: Entry level
Summary: This candidate is an aspiring Engineering Technician with roughly 4 ½ years in the field. They bring proficiency in Microsoft Office, ServiceNow, Solidworks, Labview, AutoCAD, Altium, C++, and a range of skills including troubleshooting, design, preventative maintenance, and testing. With previous experience as an Engineering Tech QC, Engineer, Jr Engineer, and Engineering Tech, they are well-versed in the field. Currently open to interviews, they are based in Airmont, NY, making them readily available for opportunities in the engineering sector.
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Position Interest: Warehouse/Operations Manager
Education: Certificate - Lean Manufacturing
Level: Mid-level
Summary: This candidate, based in Ossining, NY, is actively seeking employment opportunities. With roughly 17 years of experience, they possess a wealth of experience in warehouse management, quality assurance, and various operational roles. They are accustomed to fast-paced environments, excel in customer service, and can adapt to diverse cultures and customs. With certifications in high low operation and Lean Manufacturing, they are well-prepared for a variety of roles within the workforce. They are open to interviews.
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Position Interest: Operations, QA/QC Manager
Education: Bachelor's degree - Business Administration
Level: Mid-level
Summary: This candidate is a seasoned production and operations specialist with a strong background in retail optimization, production, and quality assurance. They possess a bilingual proficiency in English and French and have a track record of designing and executing effective workflow strategies. Their skills encompass warehouse management, business planning, Kaizen, team leadership, supply chain management, and more. They are open to interviews.
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Welcome, New Apprentices!
Darren M. – Industrial Manufacturing Technician, Selux
Daniel T. - CNC Machinist, Selux
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Need to Upskill Your Workforce?
The MIAP Apprentice Program Can Help.
CNC Machinist, Toolmaker Quality Assurance Auditor, Industrial Manufacturing Technician, Maintenance Mechanic and Electro-Mechanical Trades are all available.
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News for HR and Workforce Professionals
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3 Ways to Shift the Perception of HR From Administrative to Strategic
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A recent study by Sapient Insights found that only 46% of business leaders see their organization’s HR function as strategic. That’s compared to 67% who view the finance role as strategic and 60% who consider the supply chain role as such. To change this perception HR leaders must demonstrate how critical it is to an organization’s success to align HR strategy and business strategy closely. That requires showing tangible impact, which starts with a diagnosis, or a baseline: What are the areas related to people that represent the most significant opportunities or challenges for the business?
Once you’ve pinpointed those, organize the work of HR in a deliberate direction against a handful of specific objectives. This very focused approach to what matters most to the business is what defines strategic HR. From there, HR and people leaders can show the bottom-line business value the department creates by organizing its work around outcomes. There are three that matter the most to the C-suite: maximizing employee performance, improving employee engagement and decreasing regrettable turnover. By delivering against these three outcomes, HR leaders can show how investment in their operations contributes broadly to the success of the business. And it adds credibility to the claim that HR is a strategic profit center, not an administrative cost center.
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A Rise in Workplace Suicides Has Put Companies on the Front Lines of a Mental-Health Crisis
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A few hundred people end their lives at work each year, a small but noteworthy number that has mostly risen alongside U.S. suicide deaths. Many of these acts are violent and shocking. They leave family and colleagues without answers. The number of workplace suicides fell during the pandemic, when people were working from home. But as people returned to the office, there were some high-profile examples.
That has put companies on the front lines of what health officials consider to be a mental-health crisis. Nearly 50,000 Americans died by suicide last year, a 2.6% annual increase, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Much of the public remains unaware of mental-health resources, such as the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Employers, especially in September, suicide prevention month, have increasingly urged workers to look out for signs that their peers are struggling. But the signs someone is considering suicide can be subtle, and the reasons elusive.
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What HR Needs to Know About the EEOC’s New Enforcement Plan
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The EEOC’s newly adopted strategic enforcement plan aims to increase the public’s access to the EEOC and increase investigation training and resources. The plan describes the EEOC’s vision of fair and inclusive workplaces and details expanded efforts to reduce systemic barriers to equal opportunity, including an enhanced focus on identifying offenses and additional staff and resources for enforcement. In assessing the impact of this new enforcement guidance from EEOC, one must also consider other recent, potentially contradictory regulatory developments that impact how organizations approach efforts to prevent discrimination, starting with the Supreme Court.
- Employers must recognize and avoid the behaviors and practices that can create the risk of workplace discrimination. These are three core ways resulting liability can arise:
- Direct evidence of discrimination occurs when there is unmistakable evidence of intent—caused by things people say, communicate, post or otherwise clearly demonstrate—to choose or fail to choose persons from one protected group.
- Disparate treatment occurs when one individual or group is treated one way and others who were equivalently selected receive different treatment, which cannot be justified and is also considered illegal.
- Disparate impact occurs when employment processes are fair in structure, but their application causes one group to be advantaged and another disadvantaged for reasons that are not job-related yet validated. For the past 50 years or so, disparate impact has been recognized as an invasive form of discrimination. As evident through the new plan, this is an area the EEOC will look to crack down on more heavily, especially given the fewer concrete means of enforcement historically in employment law.
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OSHA Launches Initiative to Protect Workers from Silica Exposure
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On Sept. 25, OHSA launched a new initiative focused on enhancing enforcement and providing compliance assistance to protect workers in the engineered stone fabrication and installation industries. Supplementing OSHA’s current National Emphasis Program for Respirable Crystalline Silica, this initiative will focus enforcement efforts on industry employers to make sure they’re following required safety standards and providing workers with the protections required to keep them healthy. It establishes procedures for prioritizing federal OSHA inspections to identify and ensure prompt abatement of hazards in covered industries where workers face exposure to high levels of silica dust.
Industries subject to the prioritized programmed inspections include those engaged in Cut Stone and Stone Product Manufacturing as well as Brick, Stone and Related Construction Material Merchant Wholesalers. Outreach efforts will continue to include additional industries that may work with engineered stone.
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Walmart Dropping Diplomas From Many Corporate Jobs
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Walmart said last week it plans to rewrite hundreds of job descriptions so that for many of its corporate job titles, applicants can have either a college degree or show they have needed skills through prior experience or other types of learning. The move adds one of the largest U.S. employers to the growing ranks of companies and institutions moving away from mandating college degrees for jobs in certain fields, such as cybersecurity, data analytics or operations.
Driven by a shortage of talent in high-demand areas, dwindling college enrollment amid increasing costs and corporate efforts to improve diversity numbers, “skills-based hiring” has become one of the hottest topics in corporate boardrooms. Companies such as IBM, Accenture and Google have all worked to reduce the number of jobs that require degrees—and many more are taking steps to do the same. According to a 2022 report by Burning Glass Institute, a labor market research nonprofit, some 46% of middle-skill occupations and 31% of high-skill occupations saw a “material” reduction in degree requirements between 2017 and 2019. As of June, some 13 states had removed unneeded degree requirements for state government jobs, according to the Brookings Institution.
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But It’s Not Just About Degrees… Skills-Based Organizations are Better Able to Attract and Retain Employees
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The consulting firm Deloitte points out in a recent article that by “confining work to standardized tasks done in a functional job, and then making all decisions about workers based on their job in the organizational hierarchy, some of today’s most critical organizational objectives are hindered including: organizational agility, growth, and innovation; diversity, inclusion, and equity; and the ability to offer a positive workforce experience for people.” This is causing companies to move from job functions to job skills, which operate based on four principles.
- Liberating work from the confines of the job by reorganizing work as a portfolio of fluid structures, including and beyond the job.
- Reconceiving workers from being employees in jobs to being a “workforce of one”—individuals who work on- or off-balance-sheet, each with a unique ability to make contributions and a portfolio of skills and capabilities that match the work.
- Using skills, rather than jobs, to make decisions about work and the workforce—from who performs what work, to performance management to rewards to hiring.
- Building a “skills hub,” an engine of skills data, technology, governance, and more, to power these decisions.
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Why it’s Time to Focus on the Oldest Generation of Workers
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Gen Z this, Gen Z that. How this youngest generation enters the workforce has been a popular talking point for some time. But that kind of over-attention means older workers often get forgotten. That could spell trouble for employers that leave their baby boomer workers in the dust. These folks, currently aged between 57 and 75 years old, are staying in the workforce longer than people ever have before, making it critical that leaders don’t neglect their needs. By 2030, a whopping 150 million jobs will shift to workers over the age of 55, according to a new global study from management consultancy Bain & Company. It predicts that older and experienced workers will make up more than a quarter of the workforce by 2031.
According to an AARP global employer survey, only 4% of firms were committed to programs that help integrate older workers or support a multigenerational workforce. That’s why it’s time for leaders to step up and think about the needs of these workers in a new way. That ranges from workplace accommodations like extra time off to spend with grandchildren, and programs to learn new technology.
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What Does the Talent Situation for Manufacturing Really Look Like?
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The IndustryWeek Talent Advisory Board offers monthly advice on how its members got to where they are in the manufacturing world and their perspectives on issues facing the industry. The IndustryWeek Talent Board question for September was: Several employment reports suggest that the labor market has cooled a bit in recent months, rebounding from the massive numbers of people voluntarily quitting jobs last year. What's your take on the quality and availability of talent on the market today? Among the responses:
As a company, we are intensifying our efforts to retain existing talent, improve our training and development, nurture relationships with our existing workforce partners, expand into new talent pools and highlight career paths. For production associates, we are revamping our overall new hire experience. In today’s talent war, you cannot leave any stone unturned if you want to be successful. - Bill Good, Vice President Supply Chain, GE Appliances.
The labor market has cooled in the last few months. When Covid-19 hit…many employees took time to evaluate how they were spending their lives. Quitting an unpleasant job, boss, company, or location was a low risk, high reward decision. Now many consider their work lives improved, reducing the need to quit. Economic uncertainty and dysfunctional governments add to the perceived risk of quitting.There are still plenty of excellent workers; most of them are simply less likely to be voluntarily unemployed or putting resumes on job sites desperately searching for a better opportunity. While open to listening to opportunity, they do not see themselves as “on the market.” - Becky Morgan, President, Fulcrum ConsultingWorks Inc.
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iCIMS September Labor Market Insights – “Manufacturing Jobs Gain in Popularity”
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Now that Labor Day has come and gone, we know from this month’s Insights data that a lot of people were not taking it easy this summer. Instead, they were actively looking for jobs. Application volume in August soared to the highest level seen since the beginning of 2022. This month’s report also looks at how employer and job seeker activity around recruiter roles has picked up slightly and the state of manufacturing hiring, including the wave of applications coming in for tech-related roles in the manufacturing industry since the start of the year.
Younger workers make up about 60% of manufacturing applicants. Almost 6 out of 10 applicants are under 35, with almost 30% falling between 18 and 24. Mobile devices now used by almost half of manufacturing job seekers. Cell phones quickly jumped from being used by about 40% of applicants in January 2022 to just about half in August 2023 — but slightly lower than overall labor market applicants where 53% prefer mobile devices.
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Upcoming Programs, Training and Events
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Electrical Safety (NFPA 70E) Training
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Date: Thursday, 10/26
8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
This training program is designed to educate and update facility employees on the critical occupational safety and health considerations when working around or on live electrical sources and equipment.
Upon completion of this course, the trainees should be capable of the following:
- Identifying hazardous electrical conditions and acts.
- Determining the Risk of Exposure to shock and arc. (Likelihood-Severity)
- Selecting adequate hazard controls. (Hierarchy of Risk Control)
- Ensuring an electrically safe work environment.
Topics include:
- Identifying electrical safety hazards and plan protective schemes and techniques to address each hazard.
- Essential elements of an electrical safety program. (Job Safety Planning and Job Briefing)
- Safety requirements an employer is legally required to provide for their workers.
- Recognizing steps needed to work safely on or near live parts.
- Analyzing work tasks and selecting the appropriate PPE/ensuring adequate PPE for diverse tasks /intent and limitations of PPE.
- Determining the PPE category classification of a given task
- Table 130.7 (C) (15) (a) & (b) or Arc Flash Label
- Locating specific requirements for energizing and de-energizing power circuits.
- Specific steps to be taken to ensure electrically safe work conditions.
- Perform lockout/tagout procedures applicable to any given facility or activity.
Upon successful completion, each student will get a completion certificate with all the required record keeping information indicated. The completion certificates will have a three (3) year expiration.
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Certificate in Manufacturing Leadership *Register for an Individual Course Today!*
For over 25 years, the Certificate in Manufacturing Leadership program has offered attendees a range of leadership skills through a series of concentrated courses.
Certificate in Manufacturing Leadership Schedule:
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