Maintenance training becomes increasingly necessary each time a boomer clocks out for good. Decades of repair experience and mold knowledge are gone in the flash of a retirement party, severely compromising ongoing mold maintenance. This is mainly because many companies do not document critical procedures accurately. On top of that, younger technicians coming into the craft must often learn how to work on molds by trial-and-error while older, more seasoned technicians pick up the slack of the departed boomer. To keep production rolling, the industry needs highly engaged repair technicians. The challenge for toolroom managers is helping repair technicians become skilled mold troubleshooters and craftsmen rather than tooling replacers and cleaners.

The first step is understanding what drives tradespeople. That is, someone who works with his or her head and hands and strives to achieve the master craftsman or journeyman skill level. Obvious motivations include great pay and benefits, or life-stage specific perks with flexible work hours. For mold maintenance technicians, getting a poorly performing mold back up and running or keeping a complex mold running efficiently and proficiently is deeply gratifying. These people do not need reminders to go out to a press and check on a difficult mold because they are already thinking about it all night.

The bottom line is that molders who want and need top-notch staff to maintain their molds need to offer higher-than-average wages while providing a clear path for growth and a sense of ownership of the process. So, how do employers keep the drive alive?

Before any training takes place, the recruiter needs to develop a realistic job description. This requires not only an understanding of the typical maintenance and repair technician job, but also the varying personalities, company culture and management expectations. After performing hundreds of mold maintenance audits for an array of plastics manufacturers, I can safely say that the job of mold maintenance and repair is seldom fully understood by those crafting the descriptions.

Most mold repair technicians work with job descriptions that are vastly different from one another, even though the job itself is relatively the same from company to company. This is primarily due to the difference in perception of the required skills by the various companies and departments. This includes those directly affected by poorly running molds or high maintenance costs, those in production, processing or on the OEM side of the business, and those companies that offer both molding and moldmaking. For the latter group, repair techs are often cross-trained in toolmaking to maximize a smaller staff. Many believe toolmakers make better repair technicians, but I do not believe this is always true when it comes to mold repair.

In our experience, the majority of bonified toolmakers and mold builders dislike mold repair. Most are not wired to clean and repair molds. They want and need to build tools and components with metalworking equipment. Most repair technicians spend their day at a bench using hand tools and working their way through the eight stages of repair while relying on their knowledge of mold function. These include preventive maintenance preparation, disassembly, troubleshoot, corrective action, clean, assembly, final check and staging. This is important to note because the initial stages of repair technician training do not include learning how to run metalworking equipment, programming a CNC cutter path or developing a complicated setup at a grinder.

For companies to ensure that they are providing optimal maintenance and repair training, they must understand the job of mold maintenance as it applies to the types of molds and products that their company manufactures, and they must have real mold performance and shop efficiency metrics to gauge repair technician performance.