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In response to Dick Nace’s speakout of Monday the 30th, regarding the need for technology workers such as engineers, that is only half of the story. Engineers designing items are of little use if there is not a direct labor workforce capable of setting up, programming, and operating machine tools to produce the items designed by the engineers to be assembled into the finished products. Since the early 90s, there has been a shortage of skilled and educated direct labor workforce. Basically, a problem created by the K-12 schools that focus academics on college only. They assume that an academic education is unnecessary for students not attending college, but show how to run a machine tool. The Machining Technology program at Front Range Community College has been shut down due to lack of enrollment. A problem caused by K-12 schools assuming that Applied Technology courses will teaching students the skills they require. A course taught by academically trained teachers using little table-top machine tools cannot impart the skills and knowledge needed in the direct labor workplace though taught in a vocational school. Such programs can only introduce students to the concepts. The skills and knowledge required in the workplace can be taught only by people who have been in the industry, and through use of industrial machine tools capable of far more than the table-top machines run by a small computer commonly found in Applied Tech programs. In addition, math including geometry and trigonometry is required, along with excellent reading and reading comprehension along with thinking and reasoning ability. The direct labor employee will be handed the documentation for the job to be setup and run, and must accomplish the task in as little time as possible. The foreman has scheduling, quotes on upcoming jobs, tools and materials to order and has little time to “babysit” an employee and show him how to perform the job for which he was hired. The textbook for the Front Range course was CNC Programming Handbook By Peter Smid. It had a college level reading level. An assessment test was given to all students enrolled in the course. Any who failed to read at the college level had to take REA 090 College Preparatory Reading, because it was assumed by the schools that a high reading ability was not necessary for students working with their hands in non-college pursuits. It is impossible for a traditional computer programmer to write a program for every conceivable item an engineer can design. Therefore, all machining operations are written in the software, and identified by a two digit code. Programming by the operator is but a matter of assembling the codes in the proper order, with dimensions and the Cartesian Coordinates to instruct the machine how to perform the task. Richard Becker is a resident of Broomfield.
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