Unconventional Approaches to Workforce Development

Maintaining a skilled workforce is one of the greatest challenges facing contemporary manufacturing in the United States. Not only is a smaller percentage of youth interested in manufacturing careers, but the very nature of these jobs has undergone a staggering transformation. Many of today's machine tool operators have more in common with computer programmers than their predecessors. As technology continues to rapidly advance, the skills required of a machine tool operator must constantly evolve or else they will quickly become obsolete.

The issue of skilled workforce development is not unique to machine shops. Even the companies developing the latest technologies will sometimes struggle to keep the knowledge base of their employees up-to-date. Without constant employee training, a truly innovative machine builder might find itself selling a product that very few of its employees understand. Mori Seiki finds this to be an unacceptable possibility, and has taken dramatic steps to ensure that it does not occur.

In December 2006, Mori Seiki University (MSU) offered its first courses. This new division of our company was formed to establish a new standard in employee education, ensuring that every Mori Seiki employee and distributor possessed maximum knowledge of our products. MSU takes a scientific approach to providing education on a broad variety of topics, ranging from the nuances of newly developed machine technologies to the latest theories on lean manufacturing.

Our commitment to employee and distributor education continued in 2007 through the dedication of a new, state-of-the-art facility for MSU. The 9,000ft2 building houses multiple classrooms and contains everything needed to conduct extensive machine tool training. Additionally, Marlow Knabach was named vice president of Mori Seiki University, ensuring that our brightest minds would be wholly focused on improving and refining our training processes.

We knew that MSU would eventually generate demand from customers, but we had no idea of how immediate and overwhelming those requests would be. Upon the opening of the MSU facility, customers flooded us with inquiries as to when they could enroll in the courses offered. Opening enrollment in some of our classes helped to meet some of this need, but further action was required.

MSU's Education On Demand represents a completely new and unique approach to providing education. Delivered through an online interactive experience, operators can learn the intricacies of machining processes by working with virtual graphics, emulating the actual machine environment. These models are true to their real life counterparts, so a student's experiences during the courses mirror what they would encounter on the shop floor. By harnessing advanced computer programming, controlling a machine has been recreated in an e-learning environment.

For most manufacturers, e-learning provides significant benefit over a traditional classroom model. Classes can be attended at any time, 24 hours per day, seven days per week. This provides a welcome level of flexibility for shops that cannot afford the reduced capacity that comes with sending an employee off-site for as much as a week for classroom-based courses.

E-learning also avoids a common weakness of a classroom environment. With traditional courses, the student with the least experience is often either left behind or slows the pace of the entire class. When completing a course online, the material is covered as quickly or as slowly as the individual student requires. Rather than be embarrassed by asking a question in front of peers, a student can thoroughly investigate an area that he or she finds difficult to understand. With MSU Education On Demand, students can only complete a course by scoring 100% on a comprehensive test of the material, ensuring maximum retention for each individual.

What differentiates Education On Demand from most other online learning, is the realism created by the graphics. Although the Education On Demand courses are designed to be effective standalone modules, we are also using portions of the content to augment our classroom instruction as well. We find that our students appreciate the captivating instruction aids while benefiting in terms of increased comprehension as a result of the blended learning experience.

The results obtained since launching MSU have surpassed our expectations. The division has overseen more than 10,000 hours of training, with more than 1,000 students participating. While many of these were Mori Seiki employees and distributors, roughly 25% were Mori Seiki customers, and we expect that percentage to grow in the coming year. The demand for workforce education has never been stronger and the establishment of MSU came at the perfect time to help meet this growing need.