When local community college students completed their one-year welding certification, many were being actively recruited to shipyard welding jobs--roles that, despite grueling conditions and higher cost of living, typically boast higher starting pay at first glance than that of structural fabrication shops. Capone Iron Corporation found that this practice was draining the already slim local talent pool they relied on for their Berlin, N.H. facility.

Capone Iron hired Lucie Kinney, a former engineer and high school teacher, to manage their safety program. In addition to safety, they put her in charge of making and growing connections with the local high schools. Kinney’s first program took the form of an internship. Over the first three years, Capone hosted 21 student interns who spent 90 minutes to two hours a day, five days a week for nine weeks at their facility. Students chose to specialize in welding and fabrication, detailing, or machine maintenance.

The high schools championed this program as a career exposure experience, which laid the foundation for developing the registered pre-apprenticeship (students still in high school) and apprenticeship (high school graduates) programs that Kinney developed next.

Kinney’s strong relationships with high school instructors and administrators opened the door to an advantageous opportunity for Capone Iron in the second year of the internship program. One of the school counselors asked to introduce Kinney to an administrator who was interested in starting registered apprenticeship programs in the area. In return for participating in one of these types of training programs developed to specific federal standards, the trainee can legally accept payment for their work and has access to grant funding for personal protection equipment. Capone Iron, as the employer, would receive a small stipend to supplement the trainee's pay, a bonus for spending company time and talent to prepare someone for a sustainable career.

Capone's registered pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs have begun to solve the challenge of keeping interns with the company. The pathway is now more continuous, without long breaks that allow a student to become distracted and lose interest.

To date, Kinney has authored two apprenticeships, one for a welder fitter and one for a mechanical detailer. She relied on existing published programs to help her “not reinvent the wheel” and encourages others to tread a similar path to do the same.

The program is still new, with only a few folks enrolled, but every year Capone Iron sees more and more students in their shop and is excited for the future.

Huntington Steel & Supply Co. Operations Manager Greg McLin’s boss had a simple charge: increase the company’s local exposure to the community's workforce.

“We realized that if we were going to get welders and retain welders, we needed to be locked into a place,” McLin said. Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center, a local Career and Technical Education (CTE) program, was an obvious partner--and it had an established program in which local industry could bring in lunch for students and talk with them about career opportunities. “For a hundred dollars, you can talk to what could be the best employees and the best team members that will ever be in your facility,” McLin said.

The next step: Huntington Steel worked with Marshall to start an internship program. The company now interacts directly with the students regularly. “You’re recruiting constantly,” McLin said.

Over time, Marshall and Huntington Steel developed a deeper relationship--in fact, McLin now chairs Marshall’s advisory board, which focuses on student success and industry-specific curriculum development.

But McLin notes that you don’t have to join a board to make a difference. In this case, it all started with lunch.

Huntington Steel’s partnership with Marshall has paid dividends when it comes to workforce development, easily filling the now-scarce open roles on the shop floor. They filled six positions in the first three years of their relationship. Though three of the six have stuck with Huntington, there are no hard feelings about those who left. In their exit discussions, McLin stressed that the employees do the right thing for them and that they always had a home at Huntington if something changed down the road.

Marshall connections have also facilitated other community partnerships. Huntington is committed to second-chance hiring (providing opportunities for people with arrests, convictions, or other difficulties a chance to rebuild their lives)--a boon for a part of the country fighting an opioid addiction epidemic. Their connection with Marshall proved beneficial there, as well; Marshall connected them with Coalfield Development to access and employ people who need a second chance in an intentional and meaningful way.

Who knows what these community partnerships will lead to next?

When he was the VP of Operations at McCombs Steel, Adam MacDonald recalls constantly training new staff to take over shop roles in a state of constant turnover. He identified the lack of existing skilled, local talent as a root of the challenge that slowed scaling up production.

Further complicating the situation, new staff entered the shop having never seen anything like it. The career exposure gap added to the turnover.

First, MacDonald shifted his management mindset. MacDonald realized through his training as a United States Soccer Federation licensed coach, his second passion, that the authoritarian approach common in shops had the opposite effect on an effective team. Rather than barking orders, MacDonald saw himself as more of a coach. He found that handing over responsibility to the trainees frees them to develop at their own pace with the support of a mentor with their best interests at heart. It allows employees to do it for themselves and take ownership of their career paths.

Second came the training. What MacDonald knew from his career as a fabricator coupled with his transformative coach training was what needed to be taught and how. With buy-in from McCombs, he targeted training content to specifically develop layout and fitters, knowing that those skills would easily transfer elsewhere in the shop.

MacDonald first considered doing all of the training in-house in an institute style. However, the applicants for his program didn’t meet the need for one reason or another. This is when he realized he didn’t know enough about the applicants to be a good judge of fit for the work.

To address this, MacDonald embarked on an educational partnership with his local career and technical education (CTE) community college. Through his classroom involvement, he had the opportunity to get to know students and for them to get to know him.

The positive experience he had with college students inspired MacDonald to form a similar partnership with the local high school CTE program. He found that the high school administrators were more than happy to help build the talent that McCombs needed and invited McCombs into the classroom to make those career connections for the students. Before long, this partnership encompassed scheduled weekly classroom visits from McCombs staff, a steel scrap material share program, educational field trips to the fabrication shop, job shadowing, service learning projects, and other educational experiences that acquainted students with the fabricator career path.

Find out more about MacDonald's recruitment and development strategies by watching his 2024 NASCC: The Steel Conference session, "Effective Shop Staff Recruitment and Development: Key Collaborations and Training Program Elements that Gets Them Working on the Floor and Making Money."

After five years of trial and error, McCombs' partnership with their local CTE high school has yielded several full-time employees, four co-op students in the shop, and the beginnings of a local course allowing students to complete as much of the training as possible in the high school lab before graduation.

MacDonald now knew about the people walking through the door on their first day of work because it really wasn’t their first day. His coaching management style increased retention rates considerably, and his influence remains a source of inspiration and support for new staff.

Founded in 2021, the New Hampshire State Welding Competition intended to engage New Hampshire high schools in a keynote event celebrating excellence in craft, to get students excited about steel fabrication, and to recruit participants into industry careers.

But there was a big problem: The competition wasn’t yielding the expected direct talent pipeline. Students weren’t using the welding scholarships they had won, and open positions remained empty.

SL Chasse, which coordinated the 2023 competition, sought to overcome this issue and recruit more welders from the competition into the workforce.

Joshua Merrill, CWI was a welding instructor for Manchester Community College, the venue host of the New Hampshire State Welding Competition, when he first connected with SL Chasse. When SL Chasse took on organizing the competition, Merrill was a natural hiring choice. He was hired as their Field Quality Control Manager and Workforce Development Specialist. They tasked Merrill with tweaking the competition to better meet its original goals. He saw a clear opportunity for local industry to better support the local ecosystem of the Career and Technical Education (CTE) schools, staff, and students by drawing on their own expertise and industry partnerships to build a community of skilled talent. In theory, these partnerships would be enough to support all local needs and beyond.

Having most recently served as a welding instructor at a local community college, Merrill was uniquely positioned to boost local CTE programming from an industry perspective.

“We know if [the students] have the right tools and the right opportunities, we'll have more people to hire from,” Merrill said. ”Building up these CTE programs is a really big part of what we're trying to do.”

With that in mind, Merrill initiated a distinct shift in strategy from providing student scholarships to providing equipment directly to the winning schools. All the competitors and schools walk away with winnings they didn’t have when they walked in, but the “victors” just receive more. The students aren’t competing just for themselves anymore, but they are competing for their school like athletes on a team.

The Welding Competition has remained a fun culmination event to celebrate all of the skills learned over the school year, but it’s one of many touch points of the school year between the students and SL Chasse staff. “What it really takes is the leg work up to the competition,” Merrill said. “By the time the students come to the welding competition, we pretty much know them by first name.”

What does this take? For one, SL Chasse staff typically visit participating high schools once a week to build relationships with the students and the instructors. Merrill also participates in school curriculum committees, suggesting and then supporting student projects that teach specifically about skills used in structural steel fabrication.

Find out more about Merrill's experience leveraging excitement for successful recruiting by watching his 2024 NASCC: The Steel Conference session, "Skilled Trades Competitions: Their Roles in Bridging the Skills Gap and Investing in your Recruitment Pipeline."

“What I'm finding is that the people who win these competitions–the students that do well in these competitions–they're probably better off to get a welding job right out of high school,” Merrill reflected. He found that these students bring fewer bad habits and can be easily trained towards what companies need in the field or the shop.

The goals of the competition are now broader, and the ultimate goal to solve the local skilled trades shortage is now more of a long game. Other goals include closing the career exposure gap, getting to know and support the individuals in the trades community, and sharing the benefits.

That is a win-win-win, a perfect example of the community winning, the student winning, and the employers winning. This community-building approach raises all ships.