Pricey apprenticeships help two mold shops compete

Charlotte, N.C. — Steve Rotman, president of Ameritech Die & Mold Inc. in Mooresville, N.C., believes the steady stream of apprentices on his factory floor over the last 20 years has been vital to the firm's long-term success.

From the beginning, it was an expensive proposition for the small injection mold making company, with a price tag that can top $125,000 per student in wages and tuition, all paid by the company, during the four-year apprenticeship.

But Rotman, who said he had an apprenticeship in Michigan before starting Ameritech with two partners in the late 1980s, said the idea had immediate appeal, especially given challenges the company has filling jobs.

Today, apprentices and former apprentices make up one-third of the workforce of 25 people. Ameritech has four current apprentices mixing work and school and four former apprentices now working full-time.

It would be difficult for the company to have grown from 15 employees in the mid-1990s to 25 now and survive the ups and downs of the tooling industry without the apprentice program, he said.

"We would not be the company we are today," he said. "No way, especially in North Carolina because mold making is not as well-known."

It's a similar situation 30 miles south at Pfaff Molds LP in Charlotte, where 10 of the 35 employees are current apprentices.

President Troy DeVlieger said Pfaff took on its first apprentice in 2008. When the Great Recession hit manufacturing hard, the company debated whether it could afford to keep this new training program.

"It hit a lot of us pretty hard; we had to scale back, but not to the point that a lot of people in the industry did," DeVlieger said. "We survived it. The apprenticeship program has been an integral part of the rebuilding process, to stabilize everything."

Pfaff's German parent company, Stefan Pfaff Werkzeug-und Formenbau GmbH & Co KG, has its own apprenticeship program, and that experience helped the Charlotte factory.

Both Ameritech and Pfaff are part of Apprenticeship 2000, a group of five companies and a community college in the Charlotte area that work together to recruit apprentices and manage the program.

The program, which is modeled on German-style industrial training, was the first such effort in North Carolina, and Ameritech was one of the founding members, joining in 1996.

Some of the appeal for the two mold making companies may reflect the situation for manufacturers in Charlotte, a region without a strong history of tool manufacturing and the supply of potential employees that a state like Michigan would have.

Except for Pfaff and Ameritech, the other members of Apprenticeship 2000 are not in plastics. Rotman said that's an advantage because it reduces concerns about losing apprentices to competitors.

Perhaps a more important positive, though, is the partnership with other larger manufacturers, Rotman said.

Teaming up with other companies creates a larger pool of jobs and makes the program more attractive to students and parents trying to figure out if it is indeed a good opportunity.

"When you went into a high school [as Ameritech] and said, 'I've got one job opening for one student,' it was very hard to get the attention of the right people," he said. "When we joined Apprenticeship 2000, we became a group of manufacturers that had 20 positions available.

"We didn't sell Ameritech Die and Mold, we sold Apprenticeship 2000," he said. "A small company like us suddenly became a big company in the eyes of education and the schools and even parents."

Rex Brown, a 23-year-old graduate of the apprentice program who today is a machinist at Pfaff, said his family was initially skeptical of the program when he was in high school.

"They were concerned that it was a scam," he said. "They thought I wouldn't be getting a degree and they thought it was a cheap way for the company to get labor."

But Brown said he's happy he went through the program, which paid for his associate degree while he worked, and his parents now see its value. Starting salaries for Apprenticeship 2000 graduates are at least $36,000 a year, according to the program's website.

In high school, he had thought about training to be a barber but felt that would be "selling myself short."

Today he gets a lot of questions about his work.

"When I tell people what I do and my journey, they say 'How do I do that, or [how does] my son or daughter?'" Brown said. "There's never been someone not interested in it.

"They jump on me, some people they add me on Facebook and they bombard me with questions," Brown said.

Interest in these programs seems to be growing.

North Carolina now has 11 apprenticeship programs statewide across a variety of industries, with nine of them starting in the last few years, according to Pamela Howze, executive director of work-based learning, business and veterans' services for the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

There's more interest in Washington, too. Ameritech hosted then-U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez for a June 2015 tour, with news reports from the visit quoting Perez saying the federal government wanted to double the number of registered apprenticeships in the United States.

Germany's model of industrial apprenticeships also got high-profile treatment during a March 17 meeting between President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Trump led off his comments at a joint news conference by saying that Germany has done an "incredible job" training its industrial workforce.

The praise of Germany's apprenticeship system makes sense to DeVlieger: "Germany has done a really good job of maintaining that system."

He believes Pfaff's own apprentice programs, in both Germany and the United States, help it keep a global level of quality. Most of its molds are sold in the automotive industry, throughout Europe, North America and China, where the company set up a sales and service office last year near Shanghai.

"What the apprenticeship program really does is provide that base, that continuous growth of knowledge to hand down," he said.

Read more about North Carolina's program:

North Carolina plastics firms look to apprenticeships

Apprentice motivation: Free college and a job