Getting industry support for the skills and maintenance crisis is critical but even more critical is to get support from outside of industry, the general public, business and governmental leaders if we are going to see long lasting change and have the volume of talent pools developed to deal with the current exodus of the Boomer workforce.

One person can very rarely convince a crowd to change directions or course. It typically take a chorus of those in agreement before the masses will move away from the normal inertia on status quo thinking before making a serious changes. So when I strived to tell the world 10 years ago about the maintenance and skills crises, many ignored, scoffed, or just exclaimed that I was an alarmist.

Hope that you read this submission from Don Fitchett of the Business Industrial Network.

Joel,

If you are blessed to have a vacation day to celebrate Veterans day, please take some time to develop a strategy to take advantage of the tax breaks, the new labor pool coming back from deployment, and grow your business.

Be bold, be strong, be patriotic, but more importantly be smart hire veterans.

I have had the pleasure of supporting the CPMM Veterans project underway at Fort Bragg and Fayetteville Technical Community College and to date over 60 students have passed the CPMM after completing a 4 day review over the last several month.

Tomorrow all across the country our nation will be celebrating Halloween by encouraging another generation of kids to become candy beggars or hoodlum threats by tricking or treating their neighborhoods.

Amazing how much has changed in the last ten years. With the signing of NAFTA and future off-shoring of manufacturing, technical schools were shut down and law schools were opening up in every major city across the country. It was called progress. DC thought leaders pushed the service economy as being the superior economic approach for the US to follow. Over a million US manufacturing jobs liquidated, many projected that the US would no longer have manufacturing in the 21st century.

Making kids read books or do math problems does not inspire them to become engineers. However, if you give them permission to blow something up, they get really excited and invest all of their energies. Below is an article about an upcoming event that I dreamed up 8 years ago and several of past students have went onto get their engineering degrees and now work as engineers and technicians.

This year we are going to add smoke bombs to the pumpkins to see them sail and we are hurling Big Bird to see if he can fly on his own without public support.

Forgive me for making this post a personal elevator speech, but since my family, friends, classmates and industry contacts have expressed confusion about what does a Maintenance Evangelist do, I figured that this may help clarify and unearth more supporters once more understand the efforts underway to advance our cause.

After conducting several tours of employers with new technical workers, want to share some suggestions so that more employers do not make the same mistakes I have witnessed.

Not sure if you know but I am helping guide some workforce development efforts and working with some carefully screened talent and putting them through an accelerated training program to help area businesses have a better selection of workers. This has been a wonderful experience for all involved and allowed me to do more than talk about the Maintenance Crisis but actually do something to solve it.

Are you going to help us celebrate Manufacturing Day?

Are you going to sit by and let the sports and entertainment industries dominate and continue to fill our kids minds with glory, achievement and false promises of wealth?