9/11/24 - 2059: A Solution to the Tradesman Shortage
Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the voice of collaboration for the faith and work movement.
Martha: We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to transform the workplace of every Christian into a mission field. What does that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.
Jim: Have you ever noticed that true craftsmen in this country are hard to find? And when you do find them, they're overbooked or even impossible to hire. There's such a scarcity of trades people and craftsmen. We have a mentality that we just have to be satisfied with mediocre quality. And the situation isn't getting any better because we keep telling all the kids to go to college. That's what everybody should do. What can we do? Is this a Yugo future for all of us? If you don't know what a Yugo is, just go back and figure out what a Yugo is. Because if we all have to drive Yugos, we might as well just walk.
To the rescue, enter Dave Hataj. David and his company, Edgerton Gear, smelled the problem years in advance and saw that the future of his company depended on getting kids in high school to realize that their giftedness with their hands - there's where it was. Dave then created a formal program which is now called Craftsman with Character. His program is so successful that the state of Wisconsin, every cheesehead across the state, they took notice. Now let's hear the rest of the story from Dave Hataj. Dave, welcome back to iWork4Him.
Dave Hataj: Hey, Jim and Martha. Thanks for having me. You guys always make me laugh. So thanks for having me. Highlight of my day.
Jim: Oh, wow. Nice. Nice. Last time you were on the show, Dave in 2021, Edgerton Gear had successfully infiltrated your local high school to gather some new recruits for your company. Since then, God has done some pretty amazing things like started by - we want to hear what those amazing things are. Start by telling us why Edgerton Gear needed the next generation.
Dave Hataj: So just like most folks in trades and manufacturing, like Edgerton Gear, it's a family owned business, 61 years going on. Now I've been back 32 years. We ran into a hiring crisis, just like everybody else has. Not enough kids are going into the trades and manufacturing.
Cause as you said, high schools are steering kids into four year universities and we don't need the trades. We don't need manufacturing. There was some brilliant professor who had a lot of influence who told everybody tech out of the future is going to be lab coats and computers. We don't need plumbers, welders. We don't need our shop classes. We don't need any of that.
And unfortunately, high schools across the country listened. And so shop classes were greatly reduced or shuttered back in the nineties. We basically lost a whole generation of kids that would have gone into trades and manufacturing, but were steered elsewhere.
So we were in the same boat. where do you get good kids coming in? We have an aging demographic, most machine shops and a lot of trade companies, plumbers, electricians, they'll tell you that the average age in their companies are in the mid to late fifties. And so that's a big problem. We were experiencing the same problem.
So I was at our local high school, helping them renovate them and reinvigorate the tech ed department. And I looked around at these kids and I go, hold it. These kids were me, except, I was 40 plus years ago. Not doing well in most of my classes, but I love shop class and that's where I thrived.
And I thought, these kids are smart in a different way. So I actually went back to school back in 2010. Got of all things, which people who know me, it's funny, I ended up getting a doctorate. I'm not an academic, but I developed this course. I studied what these kids need, kids like me, how do you get them involved? How do you get them engaged? And they learn different. They're tacit learners. And we developed this course called the Craftsman with Character. 11 years ago, we introduced it into our business. Our local high school said, yeah, let's give it a shot. And it was a game changer.
Our average age in our shop - this was 11 years ago now - our average age in our shop is a whopping 28. And we have phenomenal young people that were D students, F students, that were flunking out, but you put them in the right mentoring environment, they work with their hands, you give them a sense of purpose and a sense of community. And it's the most amazing thing that's ever happened to our company.
Martha: That is so encouraging. And what an effort you put into to finding the solution in a way that helps so many people.
Jim: A doctorate? Seriously? I noticed that you hid that when we were together in Dallas, that you're Dr. Dave Hataj.
(laughter)
Martha: That's so awesome. So how are you actually, as you get to know... I suppose you're not getting to know every student anymore. Is the school running the program on its own?
Dave Hataj: No we run it, but it is an accredited course in our local public high school. So we run it and it's a small class because we run it with 10 students at a time because we want a very intimate group with these kids.
We unpack their worldview. We help, , in my mind, we deconstruct their worldview and give 'em a more of a biblical worldview even though we don't use religious language 'cause it's a public school. And over that semester - it's a semester long course - and they get to job shadow at not only our business but businesses throughout the community to see all the different opportunities there are for them and really talk about character.
What kind of person do you need to be successful? What kind of a good person do you need to be successful? And then out of that, after that semester, they will often go into youth apprenticeship or internships and our company and other companies around the community.
Martha: And that's what I was going to ask. How are these kids then getting incorporated into your workplace?
Dave Hataj: Yep. So the next step after we run them through our craftsman character course. And again, we have five different companies involved. We have an auto mechanic place and auto salvage yard, the City Works Department, the trades people at the high school, the plumber, electrician and the HVAC guys.
So they all get this mentoring experience for a whole semester, and then out of that, they get a chance to see, what do I want to do? They make an informed decision: okay, I thought I wanted to be a welder. Nah, maybe I want to be an electrician. Maybe I'd want to be a machinist. And so out of that, what we do, if they want to work for us and say, I want to be a machinist, we just had two kids we just finished up with. We put them through a summer bootcamp at our company.
So now they're working. Before they're just job shadowing and get mentored a little bit, but now we're going to find out what their work ethic is. And out of that, from that semester or the summer after they finish, then if they like us and we'd still like them, the next step is we'll make them either youth apprentices or adult apprentices.
Jim: So when you look at the impact on the kids, just in your local community, we're going to talk about the greater state of Wisconsin in the next segment of the show, but when you look at the impact on the high school kids right there in your community, what city are you in Wisconsin?
Dave Hataj: Edgerton.
Jim: Yep. Oh, what an amazing... so Edgerton Gear? That was the best you could do is come up with the name of the town? Okay. All right.
(laughter)
Martha: He inherited the name, okay?
Jim: All right. So when you look at Edgerton, Wisconsin, and the impact on the high school kids, talk to us about that. How was this impacting those kids?
Dave Hataj: A lot of these kids in high schools, if you're not highly athletic, highly academic, you're not college material, as often as said, you're ignored. And they don't know what to, often schools don't know what to do with you. Okay, maybe you'll get a job somewhere, but we're not going to give a lot of attention. So unfortunately, a lot of these blue collar kids, as I call them, they may be come from broken homes. They may not have a lot of self esteem. Maybe they just don't fit in high school because they're tacit learners.
We get kids that come in pretty damaged, wounded, or maybe just really poor self esteem, maybe not the greatest social skills, who knows? So to put them in an environment where people value them and they give them dignity and say, you matter, you are not created by accident. You have a purpose. In fact, you blue collar kids, you're some of the smartest kids on the planet because you know how to problem solve, fix stuff, create stuff, do stuff. And so over that course of that semester, these kids who, I've had kids that their hoodies on, they're just totally dejected and shut down.
When you pound into them for 16 weeks how important they are, they physically change. We've had high school counselors call us up and said, we don't even recognize this kid anymore. Pulls his hoodie off. He gets the hair out of his eyes, gets a haircut and the self esteem just grows. And the transformational story is just staggering as we're seeing it over and over. How powerful dignity is for a lot of these kids.
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Jim: All right. So Dave, what I want to know is how did all this lead to Wisconsin as a statewide rollout for the Craftsman with Character program? When we heard about that, I'm like, yes, I'm so excited because this needs to go national. But first, how did it go statewide in Wisconsin?
Dave Hataj: Since every county is struggling with the aging demographic of the workforce, so in manufacturing, the trades, everybody I talked to said, we can't get good help. We're not replacing our aging workforce. I was in a company way up in Northern Wisconsin on Lake Superior in Ashland, one of our better customers. And I walked through their shop. I think I saw one machinist under the age of 50. And the shop supervisor or manager said, we're going to be in huge trouble in the next five years because all of our key people are going to be retiring.
And you take all that tribal knowledge and that wisdom out of the picture. Everybody's scared. There are businesses that are literally scared. Are we going to survive? And so we belong to this thing called the state line manufacturing alliance, which we're on the state line with Illinois.
And there's three counties that we come together and there's about 50 of us companies that have joined together with local high schools and said, what's, how are we going to fix this problem? And we're talking little shops like ours up to Frito Lay plant. Frito Lay plant for instance, has something like 2, 300 maintenance mechanics in their factories across the country. Fully two thirds of them will be eligible to retire in the next five years.
So that's just one example. So if you like your chips and Doritos, you might want to stock up, just saying.
Martha: It could be like toilet paper from 2020. Get your potato chips!
Dave Hataj: Get chips now, get them now.
So they, I was involved in the group with them and they said, what do we do? We've tried job shadowing, job fairs. We've done all these things, try to get kids interested. And finally people are saying, okay... and I've been, I've tried all those things and you have limited success. And I finally said to him, I said, I'm going to drop out of this group if you're not going to get real serious about it, because the only way we can fix this problem, we have to care for these kids. It's not just exposing them to the trades and manufacturing. You got to take them in your shop, do deep dive with them, care for them, love them, help them understand what a worldview is and how to be successful.
So I did a presentation for the whole group that came up to our shop and I started and I explained it to them. And we had one high school Beloit Memorial. If you go on our website, you'll see it. And Frito Lay and Scott Forge and a couple other companies gave it a try. And the critic, the skepticism of our program was that Edgerton is very vanilla, very white, Caucasian. And people said it works in Edgerton, but it's not going to work in socioeconomic, multiracial communities.
Beloit, Wisconsin is that, and we ran the course. It blew everybody away. The impact that it had on the kids and the companies, people, everybody just said, we're onto something. And it started getting the attention of a lot of folks, because again it's engaging these kids nobody knows what to do with. And all of a sudden, these kids are rock stars, and they're turning into incredible employees.
Jim: It's amazing, because really what you just said is, we had a kingdom idea, and valuing people, which is a kingdom idea, training people to use their hands, that's a kingdom idea, and if it's going to work In a small little town and it's gonna work with some believer kids, it's gonna work with everybody. And really that's what you did. You just you took a kingdom idea and it's blessing everybody whether they believe in Jesus or not. It has nothing to do with Jesus. It has to do with this is an idea from God because he created us in his image.
It's fantastic I love this. All right. School starting update. School, I know in the mid upper midwest, it's after labor day because everybody's got to get their fishing in and the crops. I don't understand why they even do it after labor day.
Martha: I'm pretty sure it's the farmers, not the fishing. (laughter)
Jim: It could be all of it. It could be the vacation.
Martha: Maybe it's the cheese manufacturers.
Jim: It's Door County that dominates Wisconsin for sure. Alright, what does this program look like in the average high school district coming up here this fall? In Wisconsin.
Dave Hataj: Yep. So it is a semester long course. So what happens in Edgerton, for instance, we run our course from 7 30 to 9 AM every morning. And so the kid's got to get up a little earlier and that's their first block or two of classes.
So it is an, it's a actual class. They come to our shop. We don't hold it at the school. They come to our company and I hold the class there and we take them through this curriculum. That's 16 weeks of movies. They have to do journaling. They do, we do different exercises to figure out, not physical but, mental exercise, and figure out what character qualities you need to be successful in life.
And it's not preaching at them. It's helping them to discover what's already inside of them. And the fascinating thing to me, I want to say about character qualities, they're universal. And in our world today that everything's subjective, no, it's not. Good is good, bad is bad. And kids recognize that, yeah, I need to be excellent. I need to show up on time. I need to be respectful, teachable, humble, all those things. We let them come up with the list and that they come up with the same list every year.
So one day a week, we get them in our shop, in our classroom from 7. 30 to 9am. The other four days of the week, they're actually in our shop and other companies just job shadowing and connecting with mentors who are sharing their life stories and showing them their jobs, what it's like, struggles that they've overcome, and the kids start building connections with really high quality professional blue collar people.
And then we come back in the class, we talk about it, we reflect on it. And the kids start getting a vision where some of these folks are saying if that guy can do it and was successful, maybe I can too. So that goes on for the entire semester.
Jim: Is this only seniors in high school, or are you doing it with juniors and sophomores? When are you starting this program?
Dave Hataj: I prefer to have sophomores and juniors because if we get them early enough, then they can get summer jobs, youth apprenticeships, etc. But we've had so many kids that have wanted to take it that we've had to focus on seniors in our city. But this next year, we're going to run a couple classes and we're going to take sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Because, how many seniors wake up on the first day of class of that year and go, crap, what am I going to do?
Martha: Yeah.
Dave Hataj: We have to figure it out.
Martha: I've got to make a decision here real soon because there's a lot of pressure on me. I have to just tell you I literally have goosebumps as we talk about this because number one, I just want to highlight for the listeners, the fact that you are not just saying, here's your right hand and here's a machine. And I want you to do this work. You're talking about their inside work and building the character that makes them a good employee so that they can do the work of their hand.
And so I love this whole concept because that's where the value comes from, that internal building up of people because teenagers are people. And you're just opening the door for them for so many possibilities. And I love that. So you shared that they go and they shadow in these different organizations and see what other people are doing. Then are they automatically connected then with local machine shops and fabricators? How does that part work?
Dave Hataj: First to your point real quick. People often say in our state government we just got to teach skills. We got to teach skills. That's a big mantra. I'm like, these kids aren't ready to teach skills. You got to teach them the character and do that personal development and do a lot of healing for them. And some of these kids have gone through a lot of trauma. So our class is almost like a therapy and a support group to get them to understand they have a vision for their lives.
And once they understand they have a purpose, that they are valued and get them connected, then they just take off. But we have to start there first. So then after that, as far as how they get the connection in different companies, I tell the kids this is like a semester long job interview because 16 weeks and cycling through these different companies, you're gonna get to know them. They're gonna get to know you.
And too often, I explain too often, a youth apprenticeship is like a blind date. Schools throw the kids into businesses without any vetting process. But for this, if you have 16 weeks where they're getting to know each other, the antidote I often share is when we did youth apprenticeship without this vetting process, it's only successful maybe 50 percent of the time. And that's a dirty little statistic that often youth apprenticeship statistics states won't tell you that. But since we started doing this and other companies have taken this on, we are graduating 100 percent of our youth apprenticeships because these kids, they know they want to be there. The company knows them. They know they want them there. And these kids are just, it's a pathway right into some really phenomenal careers.
Jim: And good money. They're making decent money. They're getting jobs right away out of high school and kids coming out of college are going, I got 300, 000 dollars worth of debt and still no job.
All right. But you still didn't tell us... you told us how you got the Southern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois guys got together, and you had this little alliance thing, but you said school districts across Wisconsin are picking this up. How many districts across Wisconsin are picking this up?
Dave Hataj: It's not just Wisconsin. Now it's the Midwest. We're looking at Northern Illinois, Michigan, other places. We've been doing a ton of work of training videos to be able to scale up and how are we going to figure this out. I think we're going to be in something like 25 different school districts by this next spring.
And this'll probably go way, it'll probably quadruple. We anticipate it's going to quadruple or more by next year because it's taken off. So do you want me to share about the Navy yet? Or no...
Jim: but I want to just say, don't forget about Minnesota. Okay. I grew up in Minnesota and just because of that Viking Green Bay adversity there (laughter) don't forget about go a little over to the West and don't forget about Minnesota and the Iowa people. Everybody forgets about Iowa. All right.
Dave Hataj: They do. Make some introductions.
Jim: No, I want to get you to Missouri. Okay. We'll do whatever we can do to get you up there. I got just the person to introduce you to in Iowa city.
All right. So somehow this led to you building submarines in Wisconsin. Tell me about this.
Dave Hataj: So this whole thing that I talked about, the state line manufacturing alliance, once people saw the success, all of a sudden the CEO of Scott forge, which is a big forging place in Wisconsin, he calls me up and he goes, Hey, you gotta get over to the tech school. I'm like why? He goes the Navy's here. And I've been telling them about what you're doing. What are you talking about? Just get over here. So I go over to the tech school and there's this big workforce development meeting and this woman from the Navy is sitting there.
And the class in Beloit had just finished and people were so excited. So everybody keeps telling about the class. And so she finally got to me and she goes, so tell me about this, but I've already Googled you. So I know a little bit, but tell me about the course. So I talked for less than 10 minutes and she sat there real pensively and just looking at me and finally she says, okay, I have one question. I go, yes, ma'am. She goes, what do you need to take this national? What do you mean? She goes, the U S Navy are, we are serious about our submarine industrial base. Our submarines are our only competitive advantage in our military over Russia and China, our nuclear submarines. We're a full generation ahead of everybody else. And that's our secret weapon.
The problem is we're not getting them fast enough. We're way behind in production. So the Navy went out and did a census among their 16, 000 suppliers across the country. And the results all came back pretty similar. They said workforce issues, workforce development. We don't have enough young people coming in to replace the aging workforce.
So the Navy has started this huge, hundreds of millions of dollars in this initiative to, to ramp up to, to help high schools and colleges and businesses to figure out and practice how do we get kids into manufacturing in the trades? So she called me in two weeks. She goes, we need to talk. So my answer to her was, I don't know. I'm a small shop. I guess we would need money and people. I guess that's where you start with any organization. And she goes, OK, we'll talk. So two weeks later, she called me up. We started talking. She goes, put together a proposal. Put together a three year vision of what it would take to go national. And I'm like okay.
So I started calling some friends. I have no idea what I'm doing. So I threw together a three year proposal for a couple million dollars. And two weeks later, she said, they came back and they said, great. Let's do it.
Jim: And you're going, I should have thought about more money.
(laughter)
Dave Hataj: So after that we were off to the races. I started hiring really key people to figure out how to scale it and how to do training programs. And people kept saying, we got to get all this stuff out of your head and put it into a functioning course that people can, that we can replicate and scale up everywhere. So that's what we're doing. So I have a team of six right now and it's expanding because the Navy wants us everywhere. So we're starting off in the Midwest and then they want us to geographically concentric circles keep growing, except we can only go so far north. And then we have some limitations, of course.
Martha: And in the meantime, you are practicing the skill of building these submarines? Or is that just...
Dave Hataj: We are not. We are not building submarines.
(laughter)
Martha: Okay.
Dave Hataj: But it's fascinating. The Navy has a website called buildsubmarines. com. It is fascinating.
You can click on any state and see where some of their suppliers are. And they have six week accelerated training school set up in several parts of the country for free. And you can see what different jobs there are, what their salaries are, and which companies are hiring. It's amazing. It really is amazing. So we're just trying to help them create a pipeline for our workforce.
Jim: There is no way to explain this, but the fact that God has been in the middle of this from the beginning. Remember how you didn't want to go back and work in the family business? Do you remember that? And you remember when you were kicking and screaming and whining and moaning and telling God I don't want to do this. Do you remember that? I just want to - do you remember that?
Just let him answer. Do you remember that?
Dave Hataj: I do. (laughter)
Martha: For everybody that's wondering, I will put a link in the show notes to our last interview with you to get everybody up to speed.
Jim: That's right. Okay. Listen, Dave Hataj is really modeling what it looks like to think outside of the box and to be proactive about preparing for the future.
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Alright, so we already know that you're teaching character based on biblical principles, which used to be done in public schools prior to the 1960s. Is this program going to change the landscape of education all over Wisconsin? Is it going to give kids finally the leg up that they need? The ones that weren't going to college anyway.
I think our high school principal here told us that 50 percent of the kids don't go to college here in this little small town that we live in Missouri . Are the people in higher education giving you pushback. Are we changing the paradigm here, Dave?
Dave Hataj: Okay, again, this is shocking because I'm like, I'm a small town guy and I've had people come up to me in education that have been superintendents their entire careers, were on think tanks across the country, saying this will change the face of education. I go, What? Huh? What do you mean?
They said, because you have tapped into something that we have long gone forgotten that education, it needs to be character based and it's relational and we need to recognize the uniqueness of every individual and that knowledge is not... Knowledge, education, just knowledge. That's a small percentage of the population.
The majority of our population are tacit learners and relational learners. So for whatever reason, we've gotten away from that. So we really believe this is going to, I've already been asked to help develop programs for health care, for tech and tech ed, retail, hospitality, because every job no matter, every job we need character, we need good people. And that's, a shameless plug for my book, Good Work. God calls us to be good workers. And God is a God of goodness.
Jim: Dave Hataj for Secretary of Education. Dave Hataj, Secretary of Education. (laughter)
Martha: No. God has so much momentum going now. Just, don't stifle it that way. But you know what? I think that this is just.
Jim: Why do you guys both think that being in a government organization would be stifling? You could transform education, you're already doing it.
Dave Hataj: Subversively. And that's what I love about the Kingdom of God. God says just do it under the radar. And I think, I'm gonna flat out say, I really believe that the Spirit's doing something powerful.
And I think if you look through history, that the great movements of God were often not through and usually not through the church, not through the academics, and they were through the working class, the under the radar folks. And there is such a hunger that I'm seeing in the working class right now that we want to get back to really authentic character, truth, values, communication with each other, loving each other. Incredible biblical stuff.
I've met so many Christian business owners who are saying, help me to change my community. Give me the tools to do that. And I think that's where God's working with Craftsman with Character and other organizations. Actually, I don't know in other organizations are trying to do what we're doing, but there's something special happening.
Martha: Wow. Amen.
Jim: Very cool.
Martha: Amen. Okay, you just said a whole lot, and it's so powerful and so encouraging, but is there anything else, any final thoughts that you want our listeners to take away today that they didn't have before they started listening?
Dave Hataj: I would say go to our website, craftsmanwithcharacter. org or cwcharacter. org. If you have a heart for your community we are trying to unite Christian business owners, leaders across the country to have a vision for their communities. They often, God's already given it to them. And it's also educators and too often business education, we're all in silos.
And I think the great hope is how do we all come together to unite? So if you are an educator, if you are a business owner that says I want to make an impact and help grow this next generation, please go to our website and take a look. And you can, we have a button for I'm a business or I'm an educator.
You can join a one hour informational session, unite people in your community and say, how can we help our kids? Because I really believe the business community is where it's at to change and to really rescue these kids for this next generation.
Jim: In the future, you're going to be hearing from Marionville, Missouri, because I guarantee you they're going to find out about Craftsman with Character. Dave Hataj, thanks for being on iWork4Him today.
Dave Hataj: Hey, thanks both Jim and Martha. It's always fun with you two.
Jim: You were listening to iWork4Him with your host, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.