Sea-Lect sees apprenticeships as key to growth, but not without challenges

Apprenticeships are a key part of the growth strategy for injection molder Sea-Lect Plastics Corp. in Everett, Wash., and executive Matt Poischbeg is more than happy to tell other executives about it.

He's on an advisory board of a local apprenticeship center and he advocates for them, including giving a TED Talk about how the training programs provide both skilled employees for manufacturing and good, middle-class jobs for society.

But the German-born manager has also seen up close the challenges involved in bringing that expensive training model to the United States, where apprenticeships are not nearly as common as they are in parts of Europe.

Apprentices are big part of employee development for Sea-Lect, which has about 30 employees and six formal apprentices in both mold making and plastics processing.

"Our company is really depending on our apprentices to grow," said Poischbeg, who is vice president and general manager of the molding company. "To be successful in the future is hinged on the success of our apprenticeships."

But he's also experienced the challenges: The company's mold making apprenticeship is well established, but a 2016 effort with a Seattle-area training center to start another one, for plastics processing technicians in Washington state, has been more challenging.

It's been hard to get other companies to see value in it, he said. He believes too many U.S. companies see more risk than reward because they fear the person they're training will leave to work for a competitor and they'd be too difficult to replace.

"We cannot find any other injection molders in our state who are supporting this [processing apprenticeship]," Poischbeg said. "Usually the biggest argument [against joining] is 'I'm training the workforce of my competitor.'"

Poischbeg is on the advisory committee for the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee in Seattle.

Poischbeg is probably culturally primed for apprenticeships. He was born in Germany and did two separate 24-month apprenticeships while growing up there, where the expensive programs are a staple of industrial training.

Like a lot of U.S. industrial firms that get involved in them, necessity drove Sea-Lect.

Poischbeg said the company couldn't find mold makers, especially to replace a veteran mold maker who planned to retire.

He placed ads in Seattle-area media and nationally, as well as hiring headhunters, but nothing came.

Eventually he found his way to the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee in Seattle, which was already operating a mold making apprenticeship.

He started working with it in 2013, telling himself at the time it would take five years before they'd see major results.

The hunch worked: It's proven to be a big benefit to the company, he said.

Today, Sea-Lect has three mold making apprentices in a five-year program and three plastics processing apprentices in a four-year program. It also has openings in a four-year maintenance technician apprenticeship and a two-year youth apprenticeship. Apprentices spend 540 hours a year in the classroom, besides working at the company.

He'd like to have more, and he said he's limited at times by having enough mentors for the apprentices. Because Sea-Lect's program follows detailed federal and state regulations, each apprentice needs a mentor.

"As far as I'm concerned, there's more individuals at my company who would qualify to be an apprentice but at the moment I don't have more mentors, so I can't convert them to apprentices," he said.

Sea-Lect has picked up one employee who was laid off from another company's youth apprenticeship program when COVID-19 hit, and that new hire is ready to join Poischbeg's team of apprentices in mold making.

He said that's a benefit of a well-developed apprenticeship program where many companies participate, like in Germany: It creates more of a pipeline of potential employees.

An apprentice can leave one company and find a job elsewhere, and the company that lost the first apprentice has a chance to find its own replacement.

"That's the idea of bringing this new guy in, even though I don't necessarily need another apprentice in the tool and die shop," he said. "I need to fill this pipeline because if I lose one of my guys, I'm in trouble and I can't risk that."

But that hasn't happened with the plastics processing program, he said, because other injection molding companies have not joined the AJAC processing apprenticeship. It's been harder to develop that pipeline.

"On the plastics processing technician side, I don't have a pipeline," Poischbeg said. "If one of those guys decides to leave, then I'm in big trouble again."

AJAC launched the plastics processing technician program in 2016, with help from Poischbeg.

When it launched, AJAC noted in a news release that plastics was the third-largest manufacturing sector in the U.S. but lacked "credible on-the-job training programs." In particular, it said apprenticeships in processing were "nonexistent."

The lack of more systematic training in the U.S. makes it harder for smaller manufacturing companies to invest in apprenticeships, Poischbeg believes, because they don't have an ecosystem around them the way manufacturers in nations with longstanding apprenticeships do.

"In Germany, there's a very, very sophisticated apprenticeship program for plastics process technicians and all other jobs in the plastics industry," he said. "It works in Germany because everybody trains. If you're training the worker for your competitor, your competitor is training the worker for you."

"It's not as bad as it is here," he said.

Apprenticeships can make a company more productive, Poischbeg believes, because standardized learning and a formal classroom component makes problem-solving much more systematic.

Without it, different employees may approach manufacturing problems in completely different ways and not be able to build as easily on each other's efforts, he said.

"You would waste, as you can imagine, time and material over and over just to figure things out, instead of being more in sync," he said.

Poischbeg said he's crunched the numbers for his company and says apprentices have a return on investment.

At first, companies spend a lot of time and money training the apprentices, and they may pay them more than the value they bring in. But the apprentices learn quickly, both on the job and in applying their formal classroom education, Poischbeg said.

At that point in their formal apprenticeships, they're generating enough value to recoup the initial costs, he believes.

"By putting numbers to everything, it turned out that I have a return of investment on my apprentices," Poischbeg said. "If it all works out the right way, at the end of the apprenticeship, you basically got your money back."

Then, if you retain the apprentice as an employee, you have a skilled employee who understands your operations and can immediately make strong contributions, he said.

Of course the company has to retain the apprentice. Poischbeg said he focuses on making sure they understand they have continual paths to grow professionally at the company.

"I'm always trying to keep them interested so they see they have a future," he said. "I'm always trying to pay attention to what other people are paying. I'd rather give up profit and have good workers."

It's a tricky balancing act, but the company's ownership supports the cost of the apprenticeships because they see it as part of their strategy, he said.

"My profits definitely have been squeezed, but I'm able to explain it to the owners that that's the way we have to do it, because otherwise we can't find any workers," Poischbeg said. "This is the only way in my book."

One of Poischbeg's senior apprentices recently played a key role in Sea-Lect making COVID-19 face masks on a very tight timeline. He sees it as an example of how the training program helps the company.

The apprentice, Nathan Hall, worked together with two other staff to build an injection mold for the masks, which had been designed by doctors in Montana, in seven days.

Poischbeg learned about the mask project through an industry contact and approached Hall and his apprentice mentor, a mold maker with several decades of experience.

"I said, here's this opportunity to do this mask, and said to them, not that it would make us a lot of money but it would be an opportunity to give back to the community and help out the frontline workers," Poischbeg said. "Both of them were immediately on board."

A third employee, a designer, got involved. He was already working from home to protect a family member vulnerable to coronavirus exposure.

Poischbeg said he challenged the team to deliver a mold in seven days, which they did, with the group working long hours.

"Nathan, I mean, he worked his butt off," Poischbeg said. "He worked so many hours overtime. I was so proud of them. … They learned a lot from this."

Sea-Lect featured the mask project and Hall in a video on its website and on the AJAC training website. Poischbeg credits the apprenticeship program for helping to complete the mask project and said it illustrates the teamwork and company commitment required to make apprenticeships work.

"It's a challenge," he said. "The whole company has to buy into it, specifically the company leadership, to make the mentors understand the challenges, train them as mentors and make the coworkers understand. It's the company approach, by definition."