David Hernandez: Building Skills in Electronics Manufacturing

Work Forces

David Hernandez is Vice President of Education at IPC, a global industry association for electronics manufacturing. David shares his journey from a family of educators to leading workforce training and certification programs at IPC. The discussion delves into the challenges and opportunities in the electronics manufacturing industry, the importance of skill-based training, and the need for a paradigm shift in education to meet the evolving demands of modern manufacturing. David highlights the role of IPC in addressing workforce gaps and fostering a skilled workforce for the future. Tune in to learn about the intersection of education, technology, and industry, and strategies to attract and prepare new talent to build a stronger, adaptable workforce.

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Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Julian: Today, we're joined by David Hernandez. David is the Vice President of Education for IPC, a global industry association with 3,200 member companies that span all segments of electronics manufacturing, including designers, printed circuit board manufacturers, contract and assembly companies, suppliers, and original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs as we call them, in aerospace, defense, medical, automotive, and other industrial sectors that are reliant on electronics. Dave directly oversees the development and operations of IPC's workforce training, professional development, and certification programs. He also sits on the board of directors for the IPC Education Foundation, whose mission is to help develop a pipeline of new talent entering the electronics industry. David has a strong background in education and training with expertise in developing educational products and programs prior to joining IPC. He was the Director of Education, Development, and Systems at the American Welding Society, Director of Training and Development at an Accounting and Advisory Services firm, and President of E-Baud Consulting Synergy Group, where he analyzed educational needs and developed curriculum. David began his career as an instructor at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, teaching English literature, public speaking, and coaching speech and debate and football teams. Welcome to Work Forces.

David Hernandez: Thanks for having me everyone. And that was a very nice introduction. I like how we ended on football though.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for joining us this morning, Dave. So as we dive in this morning, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you approach your work at IPC?

David: So I started in education as a classroom teacher, right? And I come from a family of educators. My father was an educator, my mother was an educator, my aunt's an educator, my grandmother was an educator, I'm married to an educator. So education was always really kind of fundamental to what we did. And I think from a very early age, coming from parents who immigrated to this country, I was the first person in my entire extended family that was born in the United States. I realized the importance that education provided in helping people advance their lives, move out of poverty achieve the things that they dream of achieving. And so it was not, I think, a stretch for me to kind of dedicate my career to education from a very early start. You know, I started off in the classroom and as I progressed through, I realized that there was an area of education that by and by was largely ignored, you know, in the general consciousness and general conversation around education that really had to do with workforce around manufacturing. And so I...kind of early in my career, I fell in love with that idea. I started working with many associations, eventually taking a role with the American Welding Society full-time, where we addressed, you know, one of my big focal points was addressing the shortage of welders in the United States. You know, at the time that I joined, there was something like a negative growth of welders in this country of 25,000 per year. And so the goal was really how do you start training more welders, bring them into the industry, get them up to speed faster. And how do you bring attention to this conversation? How do you get government involvement? How do you get industry involvement? Things like that. Eventually, John Mitchell called me up one day and said, hey, we need you to do the same thing for electronics. I said, sure, sounds fun. So I came on to IPC about seven years ago or so. Since then, we've been able to really kind of grow what we do in the industry. IPC today is the largest education certification provider in the world for electronics. We certify 130,000 people a year with our credentials. We train twice as many almost. My role really has evolved into trying to figure out how we can address the specific needs of the industry. So my background in education really has hyper-focused me on the idea that in order to address serious and widespread education challenges, we have to find ways to lower education barriers, right? And so how do you make education available to anyone that needs it anywhere in the world at any time? You know, and so we develop a variety of different methodologies, technologies to facilitate that at IPC. We leverage, you know, online training that is asynchronous so that people who need the training at any point anywhere can do it from their phones, from their computers, from their tablets. We have an online, essentially a university with professors that teach advanced courses over multiple weeks to engineers. We leverage, you know, our network of training centers globally to deliver in-person training. And so it's really not about one solution for me or for IPC. It's really about finding the right mix of solutions that help address the problem. And I think that's, again, driven very much by my background. I have experienced education at so many levels and so many modalities to so many different groups of people that I think I just realized very early on that no one solution can solve a workforce problem.

Kaitlin: Absolutely, Dave. And to circle back on one aspect of your background, I mean, your whole background is fascinating, but one thing that stuck out to me as you were providing this introduction was really around your work with the American Welding Society. And I'm just curious to hear you talk a little bit. It sounds like a similar theme from that role to this role is around expanding opportunity and attracting more people to a profession. What did it look like for you to go into a role where you really kind of had a, there was a big gap between the number of people who were needed in roles versus the number of people who have the skills? What did it look like to address that challenge?

David: Daunting any time you look at that. I like to think that I enjoy a challenge, right? And I'm really lucky to be surrounded by a group of people who do the same thing, right? Many of the team members that I have with me today at IPC came with me from the American Welding Society. You know, these are, these is a very talented group of educators, of technologists, of futurists who really kind of take a look at these daunting challenges and say, we're gonna tackle this even if it's one step at a time. With AWS, we had a unique set of challenges that we don't necessarily always have at IPC, which was that to train welders, you really do rely a lot on the kinesthetic aspect of training, right? There's a heavy reliance upon that. But, and this I imagine is gonna be a theme today because it's very much true in IPC as well. Whereas welders in the 40s, it was almost entirely kinesthetic in what you did. It was really just about learning how to move the welding stick, how to move the gun, how to do it at the right speed, at the right angle. As technology advances, your knowledge of the theory of what you're doing, your knowledge of understanding of how X affects Y in the outcome, right, becomes increasingly important. These are machines, welding machines today are hybrid machines, they're not fully automated, although we do have automated welding machines, but they're semi-automated. There's a lot of technology in that machine. It's not just a battery pack with a stick. And so you really have to train welders both in how to do that job, right? How to actually perform the welds, but also to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how the different things like moisture in the air can affect that. How the temperature of what you're doing dealing with the metal type that you're doing, the metallurgy of that is gonna affect the outcome. And so it really was about saying, okay, now we gotta take what is already a complex skill to teach and also teach the theoretical mental part of that to these welders. And so that posed a challenge. And again, very much like what I said about IPC, it's a multi-front solution, right? You're implementing online training to help teach theory effectively and efficiently in a limited amount of time. And you're supplementing that with new technology to help train people efficiently and effectively in the classroom. I don't know that I can claim to have responsibility for anything that has been the outcome of that. I think it's more just, I had a really great group of people that I worked with that both in the industry and at AWS that were incredible at finding solutions.

Julian: It's such a fascinating discussion and also circling back, you know, it struck me early on when you talked about, you know, you kind of developed this particular interest in manufacturing and then this idea of lowering education barriers. I'm in, I live now in Rhode Island, which was, you know, kind of center of the Industrial Revolution, have done a lot of work around the country in the Midwest, in the South, the Rust Belt with manufacturing and boy, that's a pretty big, big lift, especially given that there were thriving industries all over the place that went away and that were staffed by people who are retiring now. And so I'm curious to hear your particular, talk a little bit about kind of the whole industrial shifts and even get, how do you even get people interested? Forget lowering barriers, how do you even get them interested in education when people go and say, oh, don't go there, it's a dirty job or grandpa lost his job at the plant, don't do it.

David: It's a great question and I have kind of a funny answer to it, right? Which is I actually don't think it's hard to do, you know, everyone always makes it a big deal as though it's hard to get people interested in manufacturing. I'll give you an example, right? I fell in love with manufacturing through a very weird kind of series of events. Right? I had, I have three kids. Um, and one, and one of my kids was younger. Uh, we needed to buy them a bed. So we went to the store and we bought them a bed. I put it together and within a year, the bed fell apart. And I was like, this is nonsense, right? This is, I can't be buying a bed every year. This is absolute nonsense. I can build a better bed than this. I have no background in woodworking, zero, right? I, from the time that I was born, I was told I was going to college, right? And I was gonna be a professional. Manufacturing was never even a consideration, right? Now, when my grandparents came to this country, they fled the Cuban Revolution, right? And so they came with nothing. And my grandfather, who was a restaurateur, ended up putting up fences his whole life, you know, the rest of his life. And that because that's all he could do when he came here. And that's what provided us the opportunity. And so when my parents, you know, when I was being raised, my parents were like, you're going to college, you're not going to do that type of work. Right. So one day I said, I'm going to build a bed for my son. And, and so I built a bed and I was like, this is really fun and interesting. And so I started to get more and more into woodworking. And I remember having a conversation with my wife one day where I said, you know, I never considered this a career option. It wasn't even like one of those things where I said, no, I'm gonna go to college, or I'm gonna go into education, or I'm gonna go into something else. It was never part of the conversation, right? And I don't know that I ever would do that as a job, right? I enjoy doing it. And sometimes I think you shouldn't do the things you enjoy as a job right, because then you have to do them, you know, 12 hours a day. Um, but I would have liked to have had that as part of the conversation. So I spend a lot of time going and talking to classrooms and I have for the last couple of decades, you know, and, and especially young kids, and it is not a difficult conversation to have. Right. When, when you go and you talk to a kid about electronics, you can tell them, hey guys, you're going to be working in a white suit in a room under a microscope looking at these little tiny things, you know, where it's silent and it's a clean room and all that stuff. Or you can tell them, listen, you're going to be working to build these things that are going to go on the space shuttle that we're going to send into outer space, right? Or that's going to build the supercomputer that you carry in your pocket, right? The entire modern world is run by electronics. How is that not a sexy career, right? How is that not something interesting that everyone would wanna do? It baffles me, right? You know, it's an easy conversation to have, I think. And I think you can get kids excited about it if the conversation occurs in the right way and at the right time. You know, career days, my littlest one is, this is last year in elementary school and I love doing these career days in elementary school because for most of the career day, kids are kind of staring there like, all right. Yeah, right. I could be a police officer. I could be this. I could be that. I could be a nurse. And they're kind of like, you know, I'm forced to do this. But you go in there with electronics and you start showing them how, how this stuff works and electricity and everything. And it's, it's brilliant. You know, the reaction that you get from people, because it's something that they understand, it's tangible to them, you know, and we're just not having that conversation with people. You know, we're overly obsessed in this country with the idea that everyone has to go to college. And I'm not bashing college, right? I think it's absolutely the right thing for a lot of people to do. And I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to do it. But it's not the right solution to everyone, right? And even if you do go to college, right? Even if you do become an engineer, there's a lot of opportunity in these industries that are just overlooked, you know? Yes, you can go and work for, you know, a firm that does X, Y, and Z, or you can help put, you know, the next group of humans in space, you can help us get to Mars, you can help us solve, you know, the cancer, you know, you can help us cure cancer by developing the computers, they're going to help map, you know, the human genome and all of that, you know, it's about perspective and we don't have the right conversation with the right people at the right time.

Kaitlin: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to hear you talk through how you even frame this conversation and all the applied use cases of, you know, here's how we actually use this technology here, all the different use cases for electronics. And so when you think about the skill needs, and you know, whether you're talking to youth or adults about the skill needs in the electronics industry, what's the evolution that you've witnessed? And where are we today? And where do you think we're headed?

David: That's a great question. So the US is at an interesting kind of crossroads right now. You know, we, for a long time, and part of the reason we have such a big workforce challenge in this country right now, is that we were offshoring so much manufacturing and electronics, right? And we're in the process of reshoring and nearshoring a lot of that manufacturing back. But the manufacturing that we're bringing back is not the manufacturing that left, right? We outsourced at that time, what was low tech, high volume manufacturing, right? And a lot of the manufacturing that is coming back to the United States and that becomes critical from a national security standpoint and things like that is manufacturing that is low-volume high-tech by virtue of the fact that that is the manufacturing that's coming back. We are going to have to change Uh the or the skill set evolves right that is needed There's still a lot of manufacturing work in electronics that is done manually, right? But the semi-manual, right, the hybridization of that technology, very much like what we were talking about in welding, changes the nature of the skillset you need, right? You not only need some of those manual skills, but you also need that understanding of what is going on there, right? What the technology does, what it's supposed to look like when it's done correctly, what does it look like when it's done poorly, right? What are the potential outcomes and issues that may occur? So much of the work in the United States, it revolves around high reliability, you know, or no fail type of electronics, right? You can't have a computer on a plane fail. You can't have a computer that is in a hospital fail. You can't have a chip or a board that is on a weapon system fail, right? And so there's a lot more today that goes into training someone in electronics than there was 30, 40 years ago, right? Just simply because the nature of electronics has evolved. And so like I mentioned a little bit earlier, right? There's a lot more of that theory that goes into it. Beyond that, I think that, and this is an interesting trend that we're starting to see more and more. I'm starting to see organizations in our industry that are not only interested in teaching the specialist that they need today, right? So I need someone that's going to run this machine for me today, but they're interested in teaching that individual as a generalist, right? And I think it's a byproduct of the fact that we scale in very inconsistent ways sometimes, right? You can have one organization that today has to run three or four lines, and by the next six months needs to double the amount of lines they have. And so you can completely retrain your workforce every time you need to make a change, or you can train your workforce to have that flexibility, you know, where you can move people around. The last thing I'd mention about this is, and this is, I think, in particular for, you know, your engineering class, your technician class of worker, technology is evolving at such a rapid rate today. You know, it's exponential at this point, right? We don't have a linear growth in technology. It's an exponential growth. And so the rate at which things change requires that the individual know more on a day to day level in order for the organization as, you know, as a collective to remain relevant.

Julian: Yeah, your organization has, what is it, 3,200 members, did I say? That's a lot of companies. I imagine there's a tremendous variation from some of the really big ones to the, you know, it's open, and I know there are a lot of smaller ones. So given this, you know, kind of exponential rate of change, what are the challenges and then opportunities that you experience, you know, as you're trying to advance the workforce and learning and development and to meet both present and future skills in these companies. I would imagine there's, you know, we could probably, there's several podcast episodes on this, but I'm interested to hear, like, what are some of the really pressing challenges and also opportunities that you see?

David: I'd say the biggest challenges we have is that unlike other manufacturing industries, right? We talked about welding, but you can take anything else, right? Take someone who does HVAC, takes someone who's a carpenter, takes someone who welds and or is a machinist, right? These were jobs that while some of that can be outsourced to other countries, right? A lot of it stayed here, right? It was not outsourced by a significant degree. And so because of that over time we had to as a country develop pipelines for that talent right you can go to a CTE high school today and see a mechanics You know program you can see a program for someone that wants to do HVAC for someone that wants to go and become an electrician Right you can go see someone who wants to work as a machinist or that wants to be a painter right there these programs exist all around the United States. They're constantly feeding new workers into the industry But because electronics outsource so much of this manufacturing at a very early stage in our development as an industry, those pipelines never developed, right? And the byproduct of not having a pipeline that feeds you talent is that organizations who should be building electronics are having to go out and recruit new talent and then train them entirely internally, right? And when you train an individual internally to the way you do things, how much of those skills are transferable to your competition across the street? Right? And so we are in a partially because of essentially what's becoming a regionalization of our supply chains, right? We had a global supply chain for decades, right? Things that were, you know, you had one component built in one country that was shipped to another country. You had a third component that was built in a fourth country that was all shipped to a fifth country. And then that gets sent somewhere else to get packaged. And then that gets sent to somewhere else to get sold to the end consumer. COVID accelerated this idea of regional supply chains and that has really caused a reorganization of the global supply chain, right? You couple that with national security concerns that are occurring around the world and geopolitical tensions, and that's requiring countries like the United States to essentially stand up entire supply chains for electronics internally without a workforce and without a mechanism that could feed that workforce that is needed. And so It just puts additional pressure on these organizations to develop this talent and find ways of retaining that talent. And when you're addressing the problem on a one-off basis, right? Company by company, you may have one company that solves their workforce problem, but you're never going to solve the industry's workforce problem in the region because those skills don't become transferable, right? If I get hired by company A in electronics and I work there for 15 years, and I work my way up from an operator to a technician, right? Is company B, if I move over there, gonna recognize that if I don't have a degree, if I don't have certifications, if I don't have validation of that learning. The challenge that we have at IPC is really trying to solve the immediate problem that we have today, because it can't wait, right? We can't wait five years to solve the problem because we need these supply chains stood up today. We need the workforce today. So we're trying to solve the immediate problem. We're trying to put out the houses on fire. We're trying to put it out, right? And at the same time that we're trying to put out the fire, we're trying to put in the systems to ensure that the fire doesn't happen again. Right, and so you're trying to build those long-term pipelines. That's the biggest challenge that we run into, right? Is that there's, this is not, hey guys, we're seeing that in five years, we're gonna have this problem. Or, you know, we should really address this to ensure this doesn't become a challenge in the future. It's really a problem today and we don't have time to waste. I'd say the second big challenge that we have is that, while I'm thankful that electronics is more and more, in particular after COVID, entered into the general consciousness, right? It's entered into the debate at a national level, right? Government is talking about the need for chips. The challenge that we have is that the conversation is hyper-focused on chips. For context, you know, a semiconductor is often called like the brain of the electronic, right? It's the thing that kind of directs all of the mechanisms internally. But it's only one component, right? A brain without a body is nothing, right? It's a brain in the jar, you know? You need to have the rest of that technology to support it, right? So IPC has this philosophy of what we call silicon to systems, right? You need an entire supply chain, not just one part of it. And so while we've allocated money as a nation to address the chip problem, we're only addressing one problem. So if the problem during COVID was we didn't have enough semiconductors, my concern is that five years from now, the problem is we have warehouses of semiconductors with nothing to put them on. Because we don't have the infrastructure to build printed circuit boards in this country. We don't have the packaging workforce to help package that into a final product. We don't have the components we need. We don't have the assembly facilities to actually put it all together and put it into the box, it ends up at the end user. And that hyper focus of that one segment is I think a significant threat that doesn't get talked about enough. You also asked about opportunities. I mean, I think the biggest opportunity here is for people. You know, these are quality careers with a lot of opportunity. You can look at every challenge as a pure challenge or you can look at it as an opportunity, right? When you have a workforce challenge, that means there are a lot of great jobs that are available today with a lot of potential for them to be long-term careers. There's a lot of opportunity to move up in these organizations, to grow in these organizations. And while I can't tell you much, I'm not a futurist, so I can't tell you what the world looks like 30 years from now, I can almost emphatically tell you it will be driven by electronics.

Kaitlin: Dave, this is tuly a fascinating conversation. And I feel like we could ask so many different follow-up questions. But I'd like to transition us to reflecting on your lessons learned. And I recognize this is kind of an ongoing set of lessons learned for you as you're in this career. But reflecting on your lessons learned to this point, what are practical steps that our audience can take to become forces in positioning intermediary organizations like IPC to effectively drive talent and workforce development because clearly there are so many factors and facets to this work. What would you recommend? Dave: Going back to an earlier theme, we are hyper focused on this idea of everyone having to go to university. Right, there's a lot of other opportunities for great careers outside of traditional, you know, academic structures, right? And that's where I think these third-party associations provide a lot of opportunities for people. And so, part of it is changing the general conversation, right? To say, you know, university is a great pathway for a lot of people and there's other pathways, you know, for great careers. Changing that conversation, making kids in particular aware that there are these opportunities out there and that they're not these dark and dirty type jobs, right? You know, you can go work at NASA, right? I have the benefit of living very close to Cape Canaveral. And so I get to watch launches, you know, almost every week. And, you know, in my life, I've seen hundreds of them. And every time I look at it, I'm just in wonder, you know, like this is amazing. We're putting people in space. We're putting, we have whole space stations up. It's like Star Trek. It's all my fantasies as a kid, right? We're actually living that today. And so having that conversation and making people aware that they can be part of something bigger than themselves, right, I think is really important. And that starts with everyone. That starts with parents, that starts with guidance counselors, that starts with teachers, you know, growing that awareness, you know, and that's something that today everyone can do, right? Everyone can have that conversation. And I think that that is also, and this is, I don't know if this is an ask as much as it's something that I would hope that the people who listen to this reflect on, you know, is that we normalize a lot of this technology, you know, because we're surrounded by it, right? But you really do have the sum of human knowledge in your pocket, right? And taking a second to just marvel at the things that we can do, I think changes that perspective about manufacturing because there are people who built that, right? There are people who designed that. There are people who thought of that and you could be part of it.

Julian: Wow. I think like you, Kaitlin, those two of us looking at each other here, it's like, wow, so fascinating, so exciting. And I love Dave. There are all these actors in workforce development. I think what you're really demonstrating and showing here is the kind of the role that an intermediary, that a business intermediary can play and really kind of try to broaden this whole notion of how do we help people advance their education and careers. And yeah, it doesn't just have to be traditional. I grew up in an academic family, too. It doesn't have to be that, right. I mean, it's a great thing. I also think there's a whole other conversation about how these worlds are kind of coming together of vocational and academic and a lot of what you're talking about. But we could go on. And unfortunately, we're nearing the end here of our podcast of this episode. And so we'd love to hear from you how our listeners can learn more and continue to follow your work.

David: IPC.org is the website for IPC. You know, we have an education site on there that kind of lists out everything that we're doing globally to address the workforce challenges in the industry, all the different programs we're doing, all the different initiatives. You could also follow the IPC Education Foundation, which is doing great work with schools and with ensuring that we're building out these pipelines. We just published a white paper that goes into real deep detail into what are the four major challenges. We talked about one of them today, which was kind of the lack of a pipeline. And a second one, which was that that then forces organizations to become education institutions instead of, you know, manufacturers. But it goes into deeper detail into that, into what IPC is doing. So you can go and check that out. You can follow IPC. You can follow me on LinkedIn, although I think I'm a pretty boring follow. So because all I really want to talk about is workforce. But so that's really where you can follow us and what we're doing. If you're interested in getting involved, we have a lot of opportunities for people to volunteer. We have a lot of opportunities for people to help contribute to the prom. But like I said, you don't even need to follow me. You don't need to follow IPC to really be a part of this. It's really just about each of us changing our individual perspectives when it comes to manufacturing, right? When it comes to the idea that America was a nation that was built because we built things, you know? And that is core to our DNA and that sometimes it's easy to forget that.

Kaitlin: Well, that is quite the way to wrap up. Thank you so much, Dave, for all of your insights and your perspective and sharing your lessons learned and we really appreciate you joining us today.

David: No problem. It's been my pleasure. It's always fun to talk education.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Workforces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.