The Promise of Upskilling in Manufacturing

Welcome to Voices of e-learning reflecting the people living and breathing the future of education and online learning with your host j. W Marshall. Hello, and welcome, everyone, to today's podcast episode. I'm Marshall with market scale. And we're glad you're listening. Today's guest I am very excited about. We have with us Mike Melcher director of EdTech and innovation at HBS. Mike how are you doing today. During doing really good as best as anyone can do. Exactly I know 2020 is coming to a close sooner than we know. If you can give our audience just a little bit of background on yourself and what you do at HBS to kind of kick us off, and then we've got some good questions to dive into what most large area. Thank you again for inviting me here. Glad to be here. Love what you guys do with market scale and sharing this great information with folks. So hopefully, I'll have some value to add. I've been in technology and working for large Fortune 100 plus companies for well over 20 years, the last 13 at HBS mostly focused on the merge between education and technology. And you know my current role really about the last seven, eight years has really been focused on setting strategy on how we look at what technologies are going to drive business innovation and where we'll see job growth and skill change and that sort of thing. And then how does that relate back into education. So we can hopefully do a better job of preparing our educators for that as well. Absolutely and you know obviously, there's a focus on K12 education higher education professional education. You guys kind of do it all at HBS. Absolutely perfect. All right. Well let's dive in to our first question and we'll just get the elephant out of the room. Tell us a little bit about what you've seen from your expert kind of standpoint as far as the changes that we've endured here in 2020 and during this global pandemic. As far as kind of what were the trends pre COVID and now what changes have we seen and where's this whole thing going. Yeah you know I will say there's some market dynamics that don't make sense to us yet. They're still trying to figure out some of those. But you know as we look at where the country is kind of headed economically. I think everyone is feeling pretty decent right. I know there were some sort of volatility and potential for challenges. And honestly, when COVID hit and you know everyone quarantined when it went home, whether that's from school, from work from whatever. I think honestly, people have handled this far better in many cases than I expected far worse in some other areas right. The thing that I think has hit us hard was how at risk many of our businesses were right. And as we think about our retail business and how ill prepared. They were to move to a digital environment our hospitality our travel industry there's so many industries that were just hit so hard. And I believe we're going to continue to get hit hard as this extends and it becomes more of a challenge. This idea of how we change the way we do almost everything should be a core superpower for the United States right. The way that we think entrepreneurial the way that we think and in an innovative way to solve problems. I just hope we can get focused more on that as we get through this election and folks can really start to concentrate on solving these problems. Absolutely and today a little deeper in that I know we've talked in the past about some specific industries that you've seen some big changes in as far as manufacturing would be a big one as far as you know that model changing the need for continuous improvement. Speak to that a little bit. Yeah, it is one of those things that I've been incredibly bullish on in particular, the last six years as I've learned more about manufacturing industry. And if you had asked me 10 years ago, you know if I would ever spend the amount of time that I have in understanding manufacturing. I would've said, there's no way I'm spending time on that. But it really has taken off because of the interest level that we see in this next generation of manufacturing and particularly additive manufacturing. And you know I remember a time probably about six years ago when the CTO of our 3D printing division, which at the time, I didn't even realize we had one we were just kind of getting wind of what was going on there brought and showed me a prototype of a 3D printed object. And that 3D printed object was a pair of scissors and these were small plastic gray sort of plastic rough looking. I'm going OK. That's interesting because. But guess what. These were printed already assembled. There was no assembly required. No screw. No, no. No sharpening needed. And showed me as he proceeded to cut right through a piece of paper, and I went OK. I get this right. This starts to make sense. We were about 2 and 1/2 years ahead of releasing any of this technology into the market. And part of what we realize is we need to get out and evangelize this right to make sure folks knew what this technology would do how it could change things. So this idea of printing manufactured products is really new. And so you know currently there's all sorts of interesting technologies. The technology that we leveraged really came out of our inkjet printing division where we print microfluidic x right where you put hundreds of thousands of drops into tiny spaces. Right so that we can do with our 3D print presses me with our brain chip print. We do the same thing with highly powdered materials right. All of those are polymers and plastics or doing metals now all sorts of other materials coming in the future. But the ability to design a product and build it from the ground up and you actually print it from the bottom up gives entrepreneurs gives designers gives folks who are looking to solve problems in New ways a whole new way to think about how you can make products and where you make them. J.w. in that to me is one of those kind of keys is where we can now stand up manufacturing and as far as where you mean locally versus nationally nationally versus globally. What specifically do you think as far as where I guess in your own home or all the above. Well eventually, I think what we'll get to that point where we can do some of this in our own home right now. The technology we have is really at manufacturing level sort of printers right. These are in manufacturing levels are $350,000 to half a million printers, which in the industry is cheap. But if you think about a home printer not something that most of us can afford to stick in our garage and they're huge. Right So they're very large. But this idea of where you're exactly right. I think we're going to be able to print locally and being able to stand up, for example, smaller scale but still highly effective and efficient at lower costs small scale sort of customized manufacturing at local levels. And if we think about the amount of empty shopping centers. We have in warehouses we have that. That's a perfect location for these right. What you need is power and some ventilation. And that's pretty much it. And an empty space. And you can start standing up your own customized manufacturing houses because there's no need for tooling and retooling there's no injection molding and building molds. In fact, many cases, this technology is being used to make some of those molds to help manufacturing. You don't have to carve things out of metal because it was the only way you could build a product. Now, I could build that out a plastic lightweight. It reduce the cost reduce the energy it takes to drive it et cetera. So that, to me, is going to be the big changer. And as we've been doing work looking at the future, we believe somewhere between $5 and $10 million new jobs are going to start up in the next decade just out of this additive manufacturing business. Wow and so I know almost everything we talk about usually comes back to education. That sounds like there's going to be a big need for some reskilling and some upskilling the workforce and maybe it's currently working in manufacturing or has been laid off this year for manufacturing. What what are your predictions as far as what will those jobs look like in the future. Yeah in a couple ways. Right I think things will kind of morph. First off you're low skilled repetitive sort of manufacturing jobs. Those are going to be a thing of the past. And we have to think that way. And be smart enough right not to try to regenerate jobs that don't have a future. What I think this allows us to do is scale printing or manufacturing in small scale levels. But it requires far more skill. Right So first you need skill on the design process. And honestly, if you think about where we design most of our products or parts or whatnot they're there in a CAD based sort of programs. Right and so all of the CAD based programs now have additive manufacturing capabilities built into them. So when you're designing you can design for CNC machine. And you can design for injection where you can design for additive manufacturing. And so there's going to be a lot of retraining we believe desperately needed in understanding how to leverage and use additive manufacturing to lightweight to reduce cost. To do all of those things that it adds at that localized sort of level. So that will be one of those cases design and how we reskill for design will be a huge one. The other one will be, I think, a great opportunity, particularly, I think for like community colleges tech colleges, private training groups. It is really thinking about how do we help them gain more skills around functional engineering around materials and an understanding that basic design criteria as we think with a two year certificate. You can probably run these machines pretty effectively, efficiently, and understand how they work and how materials, work. So that you can have that higher skilled higher paid level job running and operating these machines doing the finishing work, et cetera. But it won't be this traditional high grab a wrench and I attach bolts. All today, or I move objects from here to there. Anything that can be automated anything that can be done far more effectively or efficiently. I think COVID is just going to expedite almost all of that movement. Yeah, it seems like we've accelerated the digital transition by about 5% to 10 years in 2020 which is maybe one of the silver linings we can pull out of this. Sticking with the topic of manufacturing market scale actually works with a lot of industrial companies. And I thought it was really interesting. On a recent podcast to get a perspective, that was a little different than what I thought before. As far as automation kind of reducing the workforce. Now these workers are being replaced by robots and a lot of the panelists in this particular conversation said, no, we're upskilling the workers we're going to keep the same amount. We're just going to do five times in manufacturing because of the automation and I thought that was a really interesting perspective to have. The half glass full look at this as a positive for everyone. And not a machines taking over the world. Have you seen that in your experience as well or what's your take on that. 100% agree right. Well one of those challenges and why we make are our products elsewhere is because of cheap labor. Right and so the labor is so inexpensive that it's less expensive to use human labor than it is to use automation right. You still need to build all of those products. You still need to design them. And in many cases, we build them in a way that isn't the best way to build those products. It's because it's the cheapest way to do so. I think this sort of technology and allowing us to do more of this localized manufacturing with the supply chain being pretty much raw material that you can bring in and that becomes the supply chain. You'll see folks like Volkswagen right who are very interested in this technology already deploying some of it with us metals and plastics where their interest is right now. And where I have an assembly plant where some of that is automated some others not. I want to stand up my own manufacturing. I want to put a warehouse in place where I can manufacture the plastic parts when I need them. I can manufacture the metal parts. And as many of them as possible when I need them. So that these aren't being done all over the world. And when you have a pandemic, everything comes to a screeching halt right. So this ability for us to do more of that just in time, build of the product locally where you're actually manufacturing was where I think we're going to see more companies begin to think through that process right. This technology is enabling them to rethink and innovate in those areas. And there will be more jobs and more highly technically required jobs come out of that group. That's amazing. Yeah and the feedback I got was that people currently doing some of those low level jobs are the best people to learn those skills because they do already have a baseline foundation on how this works. And so it's just the next progressive step and not to think of the minimum wage job to the $100,000 plus job. And as one giant leap but to think that there's going to be a transition period where the next best job is going to keep coming available for those that are kind of seeing the future along with employees as well as employers. Yeah, that this idea of continuing education. You know I'm an autodidact. I read an imperfect almost every minute. And I look for those sort opportunities where I have interest to do more of that. I think that's going to be the skill that will determine your success rate as a worker in this 21st century. And that ability to train retrain myself follow areas where I have interest reskill in those areas that makes sense. Those those are the skills that I think are going to be incredibly valuable. And you're exactly right. I also believe our community colleges and technical colleges in particular are going to be highly valued right. This is the kind of work they do. They work with area businesses area manufacturers and they help them navigate this process and skill and reskill workers right. So I think this connection point between private industry and education is going to have more value. Our concern is for four year universities right who don't always have that applied skill level. I think they're going to have to have tighter relationships and with their community colleges and tech colleges and where they may be providing the theory and that's what they do will. But you get hands on experience in your college and Technical College. When you come out you are really prepared to actually do real high quality work. Absolutely and as my listeners will know we've touched on this topic quite a bit in recent months. As far as what is the future of higher Ed and a lot of the experts we've had on have said, the Ivy leagues and the top tier schools are probably going to be OK. And the community colleges and the trade schools have never been more needed. They're going to be OK. It's really the middle of the pack where it may be a big name school that's you're paying as much as you would for a bigger named school. But not maybe getting any more value. That is really kind of going to be in crunch time this year, next year and possibly roll up into bigger systems or unfortunately, maybe not make it through this transition. So it's good to hear you kind of echo the same thing on the community colleges, the trade schools. Do you see them expanding. How can businesses even more tightly line up with education, whether that's providing their own or more direct partnerships with colleges, universities, and trade schools. Absolutely I'll give you an example of one that has really been impressive to me. And I happened to meet the CTO before I took over college in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Northeast Wisconsin tech local college and Dan heard me speak at a conference maybe three years ago, we started discussing and boy, it sure sounded like he and his president. And their leadership staff were really interested in this discussion around industry 4.0 and what are those technologies what do they mean. And we actually ended up hosting at their location. They have a international blend between manufacturers and education hosted at a different location that happen to be in Green Bay last year. So I came and I keynote at that session on manufacturing and what this begins to look like. And what we saw as that relationship created between that Technical College and the area manufacturers allows them to have this really thoughtful discussion with those groups right. The presidents of most of those institutions are highly connected into their community and particularly into the area businesses because they do the skilling for them. So their approach towards this and providing that guidance and helping them think through this is incredibly valuable and you could see how valuable those owners of the hospital businesses believe that relationship was right. I think those are going to be smart businesses who make those connections, and it's going to be smart college presidents who also do that that same level of work right. How do I find that area where I can be the biggest help to drive the economy in my own community. Right that, to me, is a smart way. And a smart way to approach it. Absolutely and it seems like to my listeners if you haven't done this yet it seems like there is an environment of openness that we've never seen before from the academic community, even up into four year universities to partner with business because they're basically looking for every lifeline. They can to keep this thing going to still stay relevant. And so I really feel like now is the time this year next year to ask how you can be involved with those universities, those trade schools and college community colleges, because they seem to be, in my opinion pretty open right now. Is that something that you've seen as well or that you feel right now 100% agree. And honestly, it's that area where I'm spending probably more of my time there than I am almost anywhere else because they do some of the most innovative work in this skilling and reskilling which to me is going to be what pulls us out of this financial predicament and economic predicament that we're going to be facing very, very shortly. If you aren't already right. There's a hammer going to fall eventually out of this. Right and so we need to be prepared for that. One thing I did want to touch on bw is that research institutions. I think are going to be very well off as well right there. They're not going to see near the amount of churn that maybe non research for universities will. And that's another opportunity, I think, for maybe larger businesses to do more partnership there. We have lots of great scientists lots of great researchers at our four year universities and typically the largest of our companies are who get a chance to work with them to help solve problems. HP has been doing this for 80 years right are our headquarters in Palo Alto is still on Stanford's campus right. We've been paying them rent for 80 years. And so this idea of how we do better partnerships with those research universities might be incredibly helpful for your business to find new ways to approach certain problems. Right and that those folks having that kind of brainpower that kind of research capabilities the grad students there that can help solve some of your problems. I think it's a really great great place to play as well. So if you aren't doing that level of connection point to your research universities might be another place to explore. Absolutely and that kind of beats me to my next question. If you have some other examples. What can smart organizations be doing now to think about these economic problems in the future. These humanistic problems. What are smart companies already doing and what more can a company do that maybe isn't thinking about these things because they're in the weeds of a crisis right now. But why should they be thinking about much they'd be doing right now to plan for the future. Yes so certain areas. We know unemployment is going to be high. We know we're going to have all sorts of budget challenges at governmental level. So if your business relates into that area. And if you're at a tech company like we are. It's the government sector and everyone needs peace. We can't make enough. Right that's right. Printers were the same boat. Right So we are the beneficiaries of that. There's a whole lot of other folks that aren't. And so how do we start to align. Where do we see growth coming. And that, to me, is something that you have to do. There's the latest version of the World Economic Forum future of jobs just came out this week, and I'll be honest with you. I love the work that the World Economic Forum is doing and looking at this holistically and where will that growth come if you don't connect into the world forum at least read through that and make that part of your studies. You should add that some of those things that we're seeing there are where are the job growth going to come and what does that begin to look like. Where are the jobs that are near the decline. And boy, if you aren't at least looking at that as a business owner, you're doing yourself a disservice. Right because if some of those areas that are decline or where you have employees or where your business lies you might need to start to rethink how do I innovate in a way that either morphs my business or allows me to be competitive. And what really hit me out of this latest version is how big the growth and how big the demand is going to be around data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. They are the top three increasing demand jobs. And I just pulled up and indeed a week ago. How many jobs were available. There were over 30,000 data science, data analyst jobs available in the US two weeks ago. Right this is in the middle of the pandemic. So that that is an area where AI and data science are going to permeate everything we do. If you don't realize it already right. It's how all the bots change our viewpoints on Facebook. Right it's how Google does marketing right. It allows them to know more about us than we know about ourselves. It's that artificial intelligence that allows us to speak to our phones and get answers back. We're going to see that growth rate and how it permeates into our businesses and almost every single way. That is another area where I would definitely be looking. Right manufacturing if you're in that area additive but boy almost any business is going to have some sort of impact or potential impact through artificial intelligence and the use of data science. Absolutely and a lot of that research and a lot of that work is really critical for the future of everything. So if you're not already looking into that now is the time I would get time for one more question. And we always like to end on a high note. So give us a good success story after 2020 or if you don't have one, unfortunately, you know what. What are you most optimistic about 2021. Yeah I'm optimistic in a lot of areas right. The virus is going to be with us. This is going to be hard on us. We're all going to have to deal with it right. We're Americans. This is what we typically do well right with challenges when they are hard hitting and we're unified around solving problems. So I think first off, you have to kind of think through where are those problems. How can we focus on areas that we can control in and that will make a difference. And so you know outside of what we've already talked about I think there's several different kind of unique areas that we're going to see growth as well right. So not just on the data science and out manufacturing one that I'm really excited about. And God it's an area that I think in learning is going to change how we learn how we deliver learning. And obviously, the pandemic is driving a lot of that right now. And that's extended reality. And this ability for us to do situational learning and experiential learning in many ways, that's actually better than doing it in a live environment right. Because you think about whether that's learning how to weld you can actually get to 80% of your welding certificate in VR before you ever get a torch in hot molten metal put in your hands. Right and you learn the order of operations. This is how we're training doctors and dentists now where they get so much more practice in a VR environment that looks and feels real because you're fully immersed and when you actually get to a live patient you already have that muscle memory of what do I do next. And you can focus on the patient instead of Oh my God, what's my next step. Right So there's a lot of that kind of work. I think there's a lot of cool software that's helping in this area as well. And I'll give you a couple examples there. One is a company called ovation that I really love their product. I use it myself in particular, when I was traveling a lot and doing a lot of presentations. They do situational learning where you can put yourself in different sorts of situations that may be a one on one environment where you're speaking to an interviewer for a job or you're speaking to a small group or a large group and then can customize what that group looks like. And then you can put your presentation on what you're going to say into that software tool. And what it does is put you in that situation, you see the audience you feel like you're there. And now you present and it is now using data collection to understand how well you're doing in that presentation. How many times did you stutter how many times did you say or so or whatnot. It's so it's wild. Then when you come back and look at that. It was one of those things that when I first started using ovation it was almost mind boggling how badly. I spent it right. But it helped me help me write I could do it on my own. And then if I had someone else watch that with me what else would you recommend. And so this idea of doing self-directed learning and experiential learning. And then the ability to have a teacher, as a facilitator in that process is incredibly valuable. If I had to practice those situations in a alive environment. How many times would I have to do that. And have to look at myself in video before I could get that. That sort of response. So those are the kinds of tools we think are going to be really cool. Another example I'll give you that is more education focused but Colorado State University is a University that actually started deploying extended reality and virtual reality in lab environments. And so they had a lab with a 100 virtual reality headsets with high powered devices up in the ceiling that hung down in this big open space and you could have up to four students at a time collaborate in VR on a anonymous sized virtual reality cadaver meaning they actually took MRI and CT scans from actual patients. And then those students could do an autopsy or could do discovery on all that they wanted to see. So they wanted to see a patient if they were, say studying to be an oncologist, they could look at stage one, stage two, stage three, stage 4 lung cancer, you could never do that. Any other way. And so when COVID hit, they went, Oh my God, what do we do. We're going to lose all this lab time with our students. They sent all of their Med school students home with virtual reality headsets and high performance devices. So they could continue to do that lab work at home. They didn't miss a beat. So I thought that was a really brilliant sort of use of technology and how are we doctors maybe more so now than at any given time. We don't lose that learning curve for those doctors or potential doctors. That's amazing. I did not know that I actually saw one more example firefighters using Ar, VR and trains you can imagine the safety issues, as well as the cost of lighting that building on fire over and over. And the water that they're there putting on it. And it's weird. They have waited gear that's built specifically for a czar and just amazing what ideas are coming out of this crisis that are going to make us better post pandemic. Great example right. How about that California wildfire for these very 40, 50 mile an hour winds blowing through. You could actually simulate that in that environment. You'd never be able to do live as you're training right. And then how do I handle this. Putting people in those situations. And you can practice over and over again. So so so valuable and scalability of being able to train more people to help fight the fires faster without having to pull all of your best firefighters out to be trainers. So very cool. Wow well I think we could keep going for another 30 minutes, but we're at the end of our time. Mike, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. I'll do it. Thank you for the invite. Glad to. Please reach out anytime. Absolutely and all of our listeners, thank you for listening. Check out past episodes and we'll look forward to seeing you next week. And always remember to keep on learning.