The following snippets are taken from the transcript of a 60 Minutes segment, “Three Million Open Jobs”, which aired on Nov. 11, 2012. Byron Pitts is the correspondent. David Schneider, producer.
It’s called “the skills gap.” How could that be, we wondered, at a time like this with so many people out of work?
Karl Hutter: Yeah, we hear way too much about the United States manufacturing, we don’t manufacture anything anymore. Not true. Not true.
Three hundred and twenty-five people work at Click Bond, making fasteners that hold cables, panels and pretty much everything else inside today’s planes, ships and trains. Their customers include the Defense Department.
The F-35 has 30,000 Click Bond fasteners. The workhorses in this factory may look old, but they’re computer controlled machines that make precision parts, accurate to a thousandth of an inch; the thickness of a piece of paper. Click Bond needs employees who can program the computers, operate the machines, fix them and then check to make sure the results are up to spec.
Ryan Costella says Click Bond ran into trouble when it expanded production and went to buy these machines from a factory in Watertown, Conn. The company didn’t have enough skilled labor back home in Nevada to run them, so it bought the entire factory just to get the qualified employees and kept the plant running in Connecticut.
Nationwide, manufacturers say the lack of skilled workers is the reason for hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs; a number Ryan Costella says is about to get bigger.
Ryan Costella: You have a massive wave of baby boomers who are leaving the workforce very soon.
Despite the bad economy, our Career Services Office* reports active hiring of New England Tech Mechanical Engineering graduates!
There is still time to enroll for classes beginning this Winter.
To view the entire 60 Minutes segment “3 Million Open Jobs” Click Here