I’m always amazed at the number of posts, whether on social media, job listing sites, or our own Microvellum Community Forums, of companies hiring drafters and engineers. As more and more companies choose Microvellum to be their woodworking design and manufacturing solution, the demand for users is increasing… rapidly. There are so many opportunities available. So, how can you increase your success in hiring people with experience?

Personally, I see this as the problem. Many companies seem fixed on “hiring” people with experience. As a former engineering department manager of a cabinet shop, I understand this fixation. We spent a lot of time and money posting opportunities looking for people with experience. There were times when this approach was successful, and times when it wasn’t.

This caused us at times, to look at hiring people with little to no experience and training them from the ground up.

This was not an easy task either. Not because training someone was hard, but because there were certain skills that weren’t inherent in some people. Sure, you can find someone with computer skills that you might think, “This person should be able to pick this up quickly,” only to find out that they’re missing a core skill. But what are the “core” skills to look for?

In my search for the “perfect” candidate to teach and train to become a drafter or engineer using Microvellum (or any other software for that matter), I was able to nail down the most important skills – skills that are not easily taught or learned, but easily recognized.

The core skills I found consisted of:

1. Mathematics comprehension and application
   
2. Reading and drawing comprehension and application
   
3. 3-Dimensional comprehension and application
   
4. Order of operations comprehension and application
   

Too many times, people and companies look for the wrong skill sets. Skills like CAD experience, Microsoft Excel experience, computer skills, or others similar to this. These skills are important, don’t get me wrong, but they are skills that can be taught and learned. There are so many resources available online to learn these skills.

So, to address the initial question of how to increase your success in hiring people with experience, you need to look past the skills that can be learned and taught. And to be quite honest, you should consider looking past hiring and instead focus on finding individuals who possess the core skills. But, where to look?

In my experience, I found the best success by bringing in people from the shop. As I mentioned, the core skills are easily recognizable, so it was fairly easy to find the individuals out in the shop who possessed them. Once these individuals were discovered they were pretty eager to come out of the shop for the opportunity to learn how to become a drafter or engineer. The added knowledge and experience they acquired from working in the shop also proved to be priceless. They understood the importance of things like grain direction, construction methods, material selections, and many others that, like the core skills, aren’t easily taught or learned.

Not to mention, this approach also created advancement opportunities within the company. Yes, it can create a void in the shop, but in my experience, it became easier to find people willing to work in the shop than find outside people with the experience we thought was necessary for drafting and engineering.

I’m certain that there are other success stories similar to this, and also successful methods to finding outside people with the right experience. And hopefully others will chime in and provide their experiences and successes.

But, if you or your company are dead set on finding people with experience, I recommend getting in contact with a trade school/college that offers a course on woodworking and cabinet manufacturing. Or, if you so desire, you can even partner with a high school or trade school to create and maintain a program teaching Microvellum for a semester or longer. Microvellum is always happy to work with schools that wish to have such a program.

All in all, the point I’m trying to make throughout this is not to limit your opportunities to find the right people base solely on hiring from the outside. Start looking inside your own company, and as a last resort, look outwardly. Companies that focus on cultivating and growing their employees will find themselves full of loyal employees who are die hard fans of the company.