The University of Northern Iowa Metal Casting Center is joining with trade groups to reach out to recruit more workers, including K-12 students.
The Center’s associate director Nathaniel Bryant says it’s an industry that impacts everyone. “In the United States, you’re no farther than ten feet from a metal casting or forging anywhere you are. They’re used in municipal, so fire hydrants, cast iron frying pans, automotive, they’re used in aerospace applications, so space shuttles use them. The airplanes that we fly on use them. You name it, there’s probably a casting or forging that’s involved,” he says.
Casting involved pouring molten metal into a mold, while forging heats up metal and forges it into parts. Bryant says this is part of a national effort to bring the industry back to the U.S. “If we’re gonna do that, we need to make sure that the next generation of manufacturers are prepared to fulfill these positions and these jobs that are gonna be created,” Bryant says.
They’ve found that it’s not something a lot of people know about, including K-12 students. “Most of the people that end up in the casting and forging industry end up there by accident, including myself,” he says. “So what we’re trying to do is get our foot in the door a little bit early, expose these interesting techniques and technologies to young kids, and then those who see interest in that can, you know, start to set up their career path towards a manufacturing a fulfilling manufacturing career.”
Bryant says the industry needs people with a lot of different specialties. “It’s a really unique and beautiful blend of all the sciences. So we need people that are gonna be chemists or metallurgists that are looking to tie the chemical makeup of the metal to specific properties of the application. You need to be a certain strength, you need to be able to withstand impact, so on and so forth. There’s also gonna be designers who use 3-D modeling software to create the geometries that we are gonna then manufacture,” Bryant says.
He says he’s run into many young people who are into video games like Minecraft and others who would be a good fit for the program. “The skill sets that make and the intuitiveness that are involved with games like that are a perfect fit for what we’re looking for. So if you’ve got a kid that loves Minecraft, they’re going to love this. So maybe that would be a decent pitch to get some students involved,” he says. He says they are options in the industry out of community colleges and trade schools for robotic technicians, maintenance people, electricians and plumbers.
Go to the UNI Metal casting webpage to find out more about workshops and other information on metal casting.