Hartford Business Journal

13 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | NOVEMBER 1, 2021 a career. Lavoie chairs the Central Connecticut Chamber of Commerce's board. A Carey employee sits on the advisory board of East Windsor's Lincoln Technical Institute. Carey workers are also represented on the boards of the Advanced Manufacturing Employer Partnership, Bristol Technical Advisory Council and many other groups. Participating in these organizations keeps Carey's finger on the pulse of what's going on in the sector, puts the company in direct contact with people who run manufacturing training programs, and regularly results in new employee leads. "It's an investment of our time," Lavoie said. "You could sit there and you could be on job boards … where you're looking for people, or you could go out there and do good work in the community, and have people call you." Succession planning Another key aspect of Carey's hiring strategy is training, specifically taking on job candidates who will replace current workers in a year or two, rather than right away. It's increasingly difficult to come across a mid-career professional looking for a new position, Lavoie said, but hiring a younger employee to work alongside a more experienced one to learn the job before the older worker retires is doable. In fact, Carey currently employs two toolmakers, even though it only really needs one, Lavoie said. They hired a younger employee to work with a company veteran who's in his early 70s. By the time the older worker retires, the newer employee will have enough experience to take the reins. "On the succession planning part of our business, we talk about it on a regular basis," Lavoie said. That's important because the average Carey employee is 51 years old, and 66% of its workers are over 50. Carey will have a significantly younger staff in the years ahead, Lavoie said, as more workers retire and likely get replaced by less experienced recruits. Those younger workers generally start at about $15 per hour, Lavoie said. Raises are performance- based and can happen as early as six months into employment. The company offers comprehensive health benefits, but Lavoie said Carey isn't able to offer expansive perks available at large multinational manufacturers. Meantime, the company also actively works to encourage kids as young as middle school-age to start considering manufacturing as a career, Lavoie said. They never say no when a school group wants a tour, and send employees to represent Carey at job fairs. They also recently participated in a state-backed "externship" program in which they hosted a technical program director from Rockville High School who spent a few days at Carey learning about what skills they should be teaching. To retain workers, Lavoie has also become a lot more flexible in his employee expectations, he said. "I had to really look at how I was managing people, and I had to give up a lot of things that I believed," Lavoie said. Lavoie was once a stalwart proponent of a stringent Monday- through-Friday, eight- to 10-hour workday, and expected people to show up precisely when their shift began, he said. He now offers a more flexible work schedule. Employees can take a day off during the week and come in on Saturday when possible. He also doesn't sweat it as much, if an employee is 10 to 15 minutes late, as long as they are productive. He's currently got an engineer on staff who is attending Central Connecticut State University and sets his work schedule around his class schedule; the most important requirement is that he put in 32 hours per week. "I think a lot of manufacturers are not looking at themselves and saying, 'OK, how am I going to adapt to the way the worker of today is changing?' " Lavoie said. "When it comes to … dealing with the younger generation coming in, the one who had to change the most is me." Carey Manufacturing employees Stephen Ritter (left) and Michael Fitzpatrick at work on the company's Cromwell manufacturing floor. By Sean Teehan steehan@hartfordbusiness.com G ov. Ned Lamont recently announced the state will spend $8.3 million on a slate of programs aimed at bolstering Connecticut's manufacturing sector, including an advertising campaign to highlight the industry's career opportunities. The state has spent the past decade building up manufacturing training programs through community colleges and partnerships with private entities, said Colin Cooper, Connecticut's Chief Manufacturing Officer. Now it's time to promote these programs and get more people in the pipeline to help attack the industry's workforce shortage. "What we need to do is drive more volume," Cooper said. "We need more candidates going into those programs, completing them, then going into the manufacturing workforce." Local marketing executives say an ad campaign could help get more people interested in the manufacturing industry. They say a successful effort should use a mix of traditional and new media that highlights training programs and their job placement prospects, higher-than-average salaries and use language that cultivates a "cool factor" for the industry. "I think we have to celebrate these manufacturing jobs and change the language around them," said Eric Cavoli, creative director at Glastonbury- based ad firm CashmanKatz. "They're tech jobs, they're maker and creator jobs. … Manufacturing is cooler than it's ever been." 'Hearts-and- minds campaign' Now is a good time to launch an advertising campaign because the state has a solid manufacturing training infrastructure it's built over the past decade, Cooper said. Ten of Connecticut's 12 community colleges have advanced manufacturing centers, and the state has forged relationships with private schools like Goodwin University that offer manufacturing industry courses. With these programs in place, the main challenge is filling them with enough students. Cooper said the state needs to add between 6,000 and 8,000 new manufacturing workers each year for the foreseeable future to properly staff the industry. Right now the state's only producing about half that amount, he said. Cooper said the ad campaign should take a two-pronged approach: encourage people to enter specific training programs with a pipeline to employment, and promote manufacturing careers as an exciting opportunity rather than a dead end. CT looks to major ad campaign to recruit manufacturing workers U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy discussing the state's 2016 "Make It. Here." ad campaign that promoted manufacturing careers. Colin Cooper HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED

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