Manufacture your own luck

By the middle of the first century CE, Roman concrete, or opus caementicium as it was called, was a ubiquitous building material in the Eternal City.

Trial-and-error processing during the previous centuries enabled Roman architects to perfect the recipe and they used it in everything from simple, multi-storey tenement housing to the amazing rotunda of the city’s Pantheon.

The material still is found today in structures two millennia old, only a little worse for wear, thanks to its pozzolanic ash—a local volcanic ash—that created the chemical/mineral bonds that held the material together.

The lesson here, though, isn’t one of luck. It’s ingenuity.

The Romans didn’t back into this one. They had a problem and went searching for a solution.

In Canada’s modern manufacturing environment, we don’t have pozzolana. Thankfully, the country mostly is volcano-free with only a few active monsters in B.C. and the Yukon. So we have to go looking for the solution for our problem. And that problem is the skilled labour gap.

Ask any shop in the country … and I literally mean any shop … and it will say it has a problem attracting qualified skilled labour. Through decades of attrition, we’ve finally found ourselves at a crisis point.

Manufacturing, thankfully, is in the midst of a makeover in this country. Young learners—those in high school—are starting to be taught on actual CNC machines and many even learn with or own 3D printers. Without interest from these young minds the country will need to rely solely on immigration to fill its needs. The best option, and the homegrown one, is to create an environment that entices young people to give manufacturing jobs a chance.

Then, however, it’s up to you.

As manufacturing business owners and managers, it’s up to you to create an environment that this new generation will gravitate to. And here’s a hint: The draw of simply being gainfully employed no longer is enough.

Environment matters. Mentorship matters. How you treat new employees matters.

It’s time to throw out the playbook that we’ve relied on for so long. After all, it probably was written in the aftermath of the Second World War.

It’s a new era, a new kind of worker is coming. Prepare now.