We believe that Tool & Die making is truly a craft. The complexities and intricacies of making a tool or fixture to produce a custom component for manufacturing requires more than just the right equipment. We all know that giving someone a fully stocked toolroom with the newest machines doesn’t make them a toolmaker. Practice makes them a toolmaker. Experience make them a toolmaker. A commitment to the craft makes them a toolmaker.
Our Master Tool & Die Makers not only provide services for our customers but are also utilized throughout our company. They are part of our product design teams; they are troubleshooters on the production floor; and they are some of the first responders to a down production line. In short, they are incredibly important to what makes Whitman the place customers go for custom component manufacturing.
That’s why we’re proud to announce the launch of our Tool & Die Apprenticeship Program. This program was designed, with the help of Apprenticeship SC, to train the next generation of Master Tool & Die Makers.
This is the culmination of a year of hard work by some of our Master Tool & Die Makers, Apprenticeship SC Consultants, Internal Human Resource Managers, and Executive Leadership. We’re pretty happy with the results. The difficulty with a program like this is trying to capture an applied science and distill it into a training program. Tool & Die Making is really is a mix of creativity, scientific reason, and mathematical. We think we’ve captured most of it with our Apprenticeship, but are definitely looking forward to working through the kinks with our Apprentices.
Be sure to visit here again to check in on how our Apprentices are doing. We’re looking forward to sharing our their journeys as they work through the program and become the next generation of Master Tool & Die Makers.
Why an Apprenticeship
The past couple of decades has been marked by a notable outsourcing of manufacturing, and more specifically Tool & Die Making, to other countries. When you talk to major manufacturers about Tool & Dies they more than likely will mention German, Korea, or China as the source of their tooling. American made tooling is a thing of the past, literally, and it’s hard to find the skills being taught anywhere, especially in the south east, in a way that meets our expectations.
The skillset is a very specific one. It mixes parts of engineering, manufacturing design, CNC programming, trigonometry, metallurgy, CAD/CAM knowledge, critical thinking, and problem solving. That’s just to start with. To truly become a Master Tool & Die Maker, you must become an expert in all of that and stay on top of all of the changes in technology coming out today.
A classroom will only teach you so much, but hands on, tactile learning is really required to round out someone’s education in all of those subjects. While Apprenticeships are incredibly old concepts, at their heart, an apprenticeship is just a way of training people in a profession with on the job instruction, possibly with some additional off the job study. Apprentices are paired with a mentor or mentors and get a chance to learn directly, with hands on experience.
At Whitman, we’re lucky that when we opened our doors in 1972, we did it as a Tool & Die Shop. It was our main line of business and still is a major component of our business today. Most of our Tool & Die Makers have been with us for 20+ years and learned the craft from our company founder. We know what it takes to make Tools & Dies and we have the equipment to do it, so the best classroom that we could find was actually our shop floor.
Also, we’re all about giving our people the opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed. We have a dedicated and talented group of employees and we wanted to create a route, internally, for them to develop skills that will help them grow individually.
We have the teachers, the classroom, and the best pool of students, so it was an easy decision to make for us to start our own Apprenticeship in Tool & Die Making.
Special Thanks
We want to extend special thanks to the South Carolina Department of Commerce, and specifically to the Apprenticeship SC Team. Without the support of them and the State of South Carolina Department of Commerce as a whole, this would have been a much larger hurdle. They helped us with the red tape and the made the process of navigating the process with the Department of Labor much easier.
Next Steps
The real work begins now though. Be on the lookout for our next posts where we will announce our Tool & Die Mentors and Apprentices as they start the journey on building the next generation of American Toolmakers.