Why it's hard for MN industry to find qualified workers

Dan Meyer, president of International Precision Machining in Waite Park, told a gathering of college-, state and business officials about the St. Cloud area's continuous problem of finding qualified young workers for its industry -- and one possible cause:

"One of the challenges we see in precision manufacturing as time has gone on, is that more and more high schools have gotten rid of technical education classes, so fewer high school students are interested in going to technical colleges and manufacturing programs.

The feeder system is lost. When I was in high school and took shop class, I thought, 'Hey, this comes second-nature to me.' Many people in the '70s learned a trade in the same way. But there’s less and less of that going on. If young people in middle and high school are not exposed to this, they're never going to know about it."

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