At the heart of events like Manufacturing Day (www.mfgday.com) is the concept that if skilled trades are being taught in the nation’s classrooms less and less, then manufacturers themselves must pick up the slack. Opening the doors of their factories to welcome communities, educators and students allows them to educate potential future employees and demonstrate the true value of their work as well as the cutting-edge technology and processes that make manufacturing stick in the mind of the next generation of workers as a career of the future rather than a career of the past.

This year’s Manufacturing Day was a great success, and next year’s event will be too, but companies need not wait all the way until October to open their doors ever year. Welcoming the younger generation into your facilities is a good idea at any time throughout the year, and, when done diligently, can leave a lasting impact on communities, educators, and the future employees of the company itself.

Wittmann Battenfeld, Inc. became the latest SPI member to do just that, recently opening the doors of its headquarters in Torrington, Connecticut, USA, to the public. Wittmann president David Preusse said that while they expected the event to draw between 60 and 80 attendees, it ended up drawing over 200. That’s because the Open House and Future Careers Event hosted at Wittmann was something of a master class on how companies can successfully plan and execute gatherings such as these at their own facilities.

Welcoming in members of the community in a way that’s as beneficial to the company’s future as it is to the attendees doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen without employee wide commitment and planning. Wittmann Battenfeld’s event had all of these elements, and ended up being a rousing success because of it.

Attendees, who ranged from middle-school children up through college students, parents, professors, and teachers, were all split into groups and each progressed around the factory, visiting nine different stations manned by a Wittmann employee. Guests heard from Preusse about the background of the company as well as some information about Wittmann Battenfeld’s products and plastics manufacturing process in general, and various other employees discussed their segments of the company, their careers, and the opportunities that exist to work in robotics and plastics technology. They gave demonstrations of Wittman’s machinery in action, and some even let some of the younger attendees try out some parts of the plant’s robot controls.

The employees involved with the event were mostly on the technical side, but Preusse noted that they spoke frequently about the various career opportunities available strictly within Wittmann’s corporate structure. “There are 35 different jobs that people who work for our company have, including sales and accounting and all kinds of other jobs,” he said. “People went to the different stations and learned how we program our robots, micro-molding and material handling, and each person that they came to see introduced themselves and said a bit about their history with the company,” Preusse noted, adding that many Wittmann employees have started in one function and often moved around within the company, which only increased the opportunities available to potential future employees that were in the audience that day.

“You can move around in a company like ours, and they might not have known that,” Preusse said. “We were trying to give them a sense of something they weren’t aware of.”

This is where a great deal of the value of events like Wittmann’s comes from; there are so many things that the younger generation doesn’t know about plastics and doesn’t know about careers in plastics and in manufacturing. Open houses invite them to learn something that they otherwise wouldn’t have about a field that’s growing, innovative and, frankly, pretty cool.

The flyer Wittmann used to promote the event played up the last aspect, featuring a dynamic image of a Wittmann-branded robot inviting people to register and learn more about the robotics and automated aspects of the company’s facility. “It’s hard to say we’re having a career fair for material handling and auxiliary products in the plastics industry,” Preusse said, noting that most attendees wouldn’t be excited by technical jargon and industry-specific terms, which is why the flyer focused on robots and plastics instead.

There’s also a public service aspect inherent to events like these as well, Preusse noted. “Some high school are training and schooling [in fields like robotics and engineering] but some of the kids are going to college and finding it difficult to find jobs because they didn’t really get a chance to learn about the allure or the complexity of the plastics manufacturing industry,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that they’re just not really exposed to any of that.”

As beneficial and forward-thinking as it is for a company to host events like these in order to excite a new generation of plastics workers and advocates, in many ways it’s also a generous way to get people thinking about options that they didn’t know were available to them.

“The idea was that we wanted to give back to the community,” Preusse said. “People of all ages have the chance to really get a great career out of plastics working for very successful companies with great benefits. We wanted to show them some pretty cool stuff that’s happening in the plastics industry, and host an event so that they could learn about a really cool factory right here in the countryside of Connecticut.”