REMADE Institute: Workforce Profile

ObservedREMADEThemes All FocusAreas TECHNICIANS

Technicians are expected to be multi-craft workers capable of operating machinery, repair and maintenance of equipment as well as having knowledge of various trades with acumen ranging from electrical, mechanical to plumbing and HVAC. The analysis found that the majority of advertised online job postings for technicians fell to the lowest level of education and training tracked to the category high school diploma and some vocational training , representing an average of 66% of all postings across the technician groupings in Recycling and Recovery, Remanufacturing and EOL Reuse and Design for Re-X. This finding suggests a minority of employers actually advertise an associate degree as the baseline technical education level required for employment in their firms. The training-oriented preference over a formal college degree by employers suggests that many of their technician candidates for entry level occupations are likely being hired at a semi-skilled or even low skilled level. This is likely to be the case particularly in the Recycling & Recovery grouping. A further observation in the data follows the presence of Employment Services as the third and fourth strongest industry driving online postings for both Recycling and Recovery and Design for Re-X technician groupings. The presence of Employment Services as sources for job postings among these two technician groupings suggests a temp to hire approach for entry level candidates rather than rely wholly on a traditional direct hire model to secure their technician workforce. In both of these technician groupings, the majority of postings advertise with pay at the less than $35,000 per year. As reported earlier for Recycling and Recovery, 39% of postings advertised a wage of less than $17 an hour for this group. Implications for REMADE Education and Workforce Development from these data findings suggest there is likely an opportunity for developing a variety of specialized Just in Time and On-the-Job (OJT) training in partnership with existing industry corporate training or with third party training providers to address the need to advance and expose a low skilled and semi-skilled technician workforce to higher level REMADE specific technologies, processes and practices. The data also suggest consideration of partnerships with community and technical colleges that offer more substantial technical training that provide educational opportunities for career incumbent technicians to upskill their knowledge, skills and abilities with advanced certificates,

77 / Workforce Profile | REMADE Institute

/ Focus Areas