How Does Your Company Treat New Recruits?

I am a technical consultant for a rapidly developing company with a global presence. Most of our manufacturing processes are labour intensive and propitiatory confidential. Young engineers entering our company as first line supervisor, do face tough times not so much due to "over demanding managers" but because of tough nature of the job and managing production workers. For many the job is first time exposure to an engineering industry and many of them are absolutely at sea trying to get grip of the production set up and try their hands at resolving day to day problems both technical and man management. Under these trying circumstances it is not uncommon for the youngsters to misunderstand helpful advice as criticism and often result in good and potentially competent engineers leaving the organization.

So we have decided to run a mentoring programme in our organization and we are in the process of implementing the same.

Implementing the mentor-ship programme is no cake walk. It require getting employees participate continuously on an ongoing basis in the program. No doubt there is a tremendous value in the mentoring program, but we might see many employees may not be naturally interested in the idea of mentor ship. A good work around to this might be to tie up the mentoring program to employee objectives/ performance measurement/ bonus etc. Some of the other challenges I foresee in implementing such a program in a typical small business are employee turnover, the hours spent are not billable so employees might give this lesser priority. With right amount management encouragement a well designed programme to encourage employees to participate continuously it might be possible to leverage mentor ship to yield positive results.

I started my carrier with one year shop floor training. I learnt a lot from experienced workman about operating different types of machine tools and intricacies of the machining also shop floor culture, it helped me a lot in my carrier.

Dear Suresh,

It is always an amazing experience to observe the never ending rabbit out of the box tricks from veteran mechanic of old school. They have developed intuitive skills over years of facing challenges of lack of basic facilities, only countries like India can throw! You must have been privileged to have had association of such mechanics . Of course it most of the old timers will confide their hard earned tricks of the trade only to the deserving and definitely not to all sundry!

Dear Krishnan,

Yes it was great experience to work in shop floor during 1961 to 1962. I had to be humble with senior workers, and I had to start with cleaning of the machines to be one like them. They were very co-operative and very jolly people. Only thing one should know is to handle them.

Yes. Our company give lot of attention to train GETs. A special team is set up for this. One complete year is dedicated to train fresh engineers and these are absorbed in Production, QC/ QA/ D&D, etc departments. I am working as maintenance manager and my strategy is different. This because one needs special love towards maintenance work. I take ITI Technicians; train them on basics in a very practical manner. I encourage them to pursue higher studies and most of them become Diploma Engineers in 3 to 5 years. I further encourage them to do Graduation and fully cooperate by giving leaves, finance, etc. Thus they become fully trained Graduate engineers. Last year one engineer working for me completed his masters Degree and left us to take up more challenging Job. I not only train them technically but also give training on soft-skills like: Time management, Assertiveness, Using statistical tools, effective supervision, etc.

Can I work for you !

Great way to get a list of employment savvy companies.

We have had 4 apprentices over the past 4 years and only one of them has made it through to the final year.

I don't imagine that this reflexes badly on our company as one of them decided that toolmaking / component machining as not for them. He enjoyed it for approximately one year and then decided that he want pursue another career - panel beating

One flew to NZ and has not returned and the other would turn up 1/2 - 1 hour late daily which unpleasant for team moral.

As an employer we find it difficult to find apprentices that are committed to the trade and we take another one on tomorrow if the right person came along

As for treatment of junior workers we (lour team) treat our workers as we wish to be treated which is.

Anthony@alno

www.alnoproductservices.com.au