Here’s another good article on skill shortage related to maintenance. The gist: Who’s gonna replace all the retirees? No one wants to go into maintenance.

It’s said to be a crisis. The article says you can hardly find mechanics and technicians … that we could use 25,000 more welders alone per year … that welding ties into half the GNP of the U.S. So this is important stuff.

These words in the article really got me thinking:

Maintenance technicians have an image problem. Their jobs are considered “dirty.” Some consider them “grease monkeys.” The conventional thinking is: If you pursue a career in manufacturing or construction, prepare to get your hands dirty. Unfortunately, this inaccurate perception contributes to a shortage of skilled workers.

It made me connect a few things.

First, New Pig is all about dirty jobs. Particularly wet dirty jobs. We publish a lot of “before” images of how messy workplaces can get.

Second, our leading products (PIG® Absorbents) are low-tech answers for workplace messes. You don’t need skill to use them. You do need to choose the right product and know what you’re doing when using haz-mat products, but for the most part, there’s not much to it.

In other words, we often show maintenance staff in dirty settings doing low-skill work.

Not always. We show skilled maintenance as well: techs doing repairs, emergency responders containing spills.

And we have the highest respect for our customers. We give better service than many companies selling high-tech products. Nothing matters more to us than the people keeping their facilities running.

Plus, we have technical specialists because maintenance work often gets complicated: chemicals, regulations, complex machines.

So we get how worthy and valuable maintenance is.

But at some companies, management doesn’t get it. Joel Leonard, the leading “maintenance evangelist” pinpoints the marketing of maintenance as the main issue. “Most executives do not truly appreciate maintenance nor understand its purpose.”

The way I’m connecting all these things is:

• We serve maintenance professionals.
• We’re pretty good at marketing.
• If the maintenance pro needs marketing, maybe we can help.

Maybe we even have a special opportunity to say, “Hey, there’s a lot more to maintenance than the low-skill, dirty-job niche that we highlight.”

I’m gonna be looking for ways to do that.

By Keith

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.