Name: Toyota Is Investing in Trade Skills
Uploaded: 2016-10-17
Duration: 10 min 11 s
Description: In an attempt to recruit younger employees

[ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ MUSIC ] We are in Central Kentuck, this is known as the Blue Grass Syria. It's also the heart of Kentucky bourbon country. We're surrounded by facilities that produce ninety- five percent of the world's bourbon. This is also the heart of thoroughbred racing. Horse country. So, Kentucky and horses and bourbon [ MUSIC ] Not gonna get any better than that. We also have our Toyota plant here. This is Toyota's largest plant in the world. Produces over half a million vehicles a year. I've worked at Toyota for 29 years. I came directly to Toyota from the US Navy where I was a fast attack submariner on a nuclear submarine. On a submarine you really have to be multi- skilled and so Toyota's multi skilled team environment was really appealing to me. From my first days at Toyota, I worked continuously on developing our training and education programs for our skilled technicians. The problem we have is that we have tended to consider skilled and craft jobs to be second tier kind of jobs. You know you ought to go to university and get a four year degree but if you can't do that, if you're not meant for that, you might consider skilled trades. So that kind of thinking deters a lot of kids from entering that. In fact the gap is estimated to be as of 2011, 600 thousand unfilled openings and it's continuing to get worse. [ MUSIC ] Many of the 120 workers here have been on the job 20 to 30 years, and are getting set to retire. The problem? There aren't enough new hires to fill the void. We're seeing a shortage of skilled workers coming out of [ UNKNOWN ] schools. With baby boomers retiring, the need for those skilled workers is there. We still have too many people Who can't get a job because they don't have the right skills and we have too many employers who have vacancies that they can't fill because our workers don't have the right skill. And so here is what we did. We've partnered with Bluegrass Community and Technical College. And we basically reinvented the two year technical degree from the ground up. All the way from the ground up. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] My dad is a state trooper. I actually signed up and And made my mom cry sadly enough. Cuz I was getting ready to go in the military straight out of high school. Because I originally wanted to go in law enforcement like my father. And he looked at me, and it was like man, you've always been really good at working on mechanical things. Why would you throw that skill away? And I was just I want to follow in my dad's footsteps. All that type of deal. And Toyota called me, and they're like hey. We got this job. They'll pay you $ 33. 00 an hour after the program, and we'll help pay for your school and stuff. I was like. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Really. You need a control relay down here too. STudents of [ UNKNOWN ] school two days a week eight hours a day. And then they work with their employer, the other three days, also eight hours a day. Not only we study here. But we are also working in our field of study at the same time. And we can say alright Well, I'm going to work on this bot. And I'm going to make it do simple pick- and- plays. The second I go over to my job they say, do you remember how to do this from school? Yeah, I learned it yesterday, and everything just coincides perfectly. It really reinforces what you learn in class when you work in a workplace and come to class. Yeah, make sure you all have your safety glasses on, I'll go get mine. And we pay them enough money, because they're working three days a week, for them to pay their education and graduate debt- free. I have a buddy right now who just graduated with a four- year degree, getting ready to go get his Master's and then Doctorate for pharmaceutical work. And he showed me the tally, and it's $ 215, 000 in debt right now. And I'm at zero. So I can't complain. Friends in college, we get out, we get a job Friends in college, they go to find a job. A lot of the ones I know, they work Starbucks or McDonald's or something cuz they can't find a job for what they had their education in. And for us, we get a real big benefit from it because we get to actually be in the job as soon as we graduate. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] I was actually a psychology major, and then a health sciences major. And really I just didn't like where I was, like I didn't like going to a normal school. I wanted to be able to actually get my hands on stuff and work on stuff. And my dad's a maintenance technician at Toyota. He loves it. He doesn't come home miserable everyday. He's not tired, he can actually do stuff and enjoy his life after work. [ INAUDIBLE ] You'll get it. This is the campus, this is the learning area so remember I said manufacturing emulation, you see it on there? No classrooms, open area, high ceiling. Concrete floor, another aspect is having industrial grade equipment. This is the manufacturing simulator. Notice an industrial grade. It was designed for this program. It is a 480 volt machine, it's real industry. It has modern technology, that's HMI. Human Machine Interface. On the control over there it has a transfer process, it has a robot, so I have immediate contextual application in the real world of what this is like. How would I know did I have a fault in the machine? What's it telling you? Right now it says power on fault air pressure. Air pressure, so you have no air. How would you figure out where the air fault went? Well, I mean you would come down here where the airlines are running. But, as of right now, it's cuz you cut off that power thing. Okay, perfect, so reset it. Here's the cool thing about doing this from the employer side, we literally pick every single course. The students would take. And therefore we had the most high- priority training, so that they made maximum use of that time. Not bad at all. Look at that. See inside of [ UNKNOWN ], if he turns it loose, he's in a whole workshop. The kind of people that are working with the manufacturing industry today are skilled workers, highly skilled workers. And companies. They're keenly aware of what kind of skill they need and at what cost. As time progressed, technology has progressed. It's become more okay you're a robot doctor now. You got to go in there and figure out what's wrong with this robot. What's wrong with the programming, how to make it better. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So robotics is the class that we're working on this semester. The Baxter is new to the industry. And right here we're working on a pick and place system. So Baxter will scan a certain area that we set up and will pick up just the objects that it is being told to pick up. So first what you wanna do is you just wanna program it to pick up your point. So next we're gonna program it to come straight over. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] And then drop it. So, in a factory, if someone has a job as simple as picking something off a conveyor and loading it into a box, they could replace that person with Baxter. And so instead of paying a production member and paying for their health insurance and other benefits that come with a production member, they can now buy in Baxter We made Baxter dance one time We need music playing for it. Music and disco lights. [ MUSIC ] I don't know. You have to have really humor whenever you hear it, so. I love my job, I mean, that's all I can say. I love my job. I love the people I work with. I love the environment. They trust me more at work to do Stop flight, things that need to be done. So, I'm, feel like my value to the work place. [ MUSIC ] You know we're not trying, this Toyota, we're not trying to sell this. But it's starting to spread very quickly. Here we are six years later, and we have well over 100 companies have joined us because that program works. We've had a number of national educators who have stated that they believe is the best two year technical program In the US, we've had several observations that they think that this is actually the model of the future. That's really satisfying. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

In an attempt to recruit younger employees