Tube and pipe business must rebuild in-house knowledge

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As a steel tube industry rookie in the 1970s, Dan Ventura got into the game with a lot to learn. The difference then was that there were always longtime mill workers—the veterans of the club—ready to coach the young people coming up through the ranks.

That informal system of generational mentorship in tube mills and fabrication shops has become as uncommon as Major League baseball players staying with the same team for 20 years. It might seem like living in the past. But as Ventura sees it, if the industry wants to maintain any sort of vitality, the businesses within it must somehow find a way to revive that process of passing down knowledge, veteran to rookie, that once served them so well.

“There was an actual line of progression within a manufacturing facility on where you started and ultimately where you could get to,” said Ventura, a longtime Tube and Pipe Association board member who spent several years at two well-known tube mill manufacturers before launching his own consulting business, Ventura & Associates, in Orland Park, Ill. “You started at this portion … of the machine, and then you learned it as you went up to become the operator of that machine. And then you did the same thing in shipping—you started driving a forklift, then loading a truck, understanding the documentation.

“Those were the parts of the line of progression. It was almost like an apprenticeship.”

Losing Tribal Knowledge

That tradition has all but disappeared because the people who carried it on are walking out the door in far greater numbers than can be replaced. That loss of in-house, or tribal, knowledge has only accelerated with the massive wave of baby boomer retirements in the past five to 10 years. According to U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, from 2011 to 2021, approximately 1.5 million baby boomers left the civilian workforce.

In the tube and pipe world, those exodus numbers included plant superintendents who had hands-on knowledge and could troubleshoot machine problems, a well as union line workers who had the same amount of experience as their supervisors but never went into management.

“So, you’re losing the manager who can train the new employee, and you’re losing the man who has the most experience, having done the job the longest, at the same time,” Ventura said.

Getting New Blood Into the Stream

One impediment to infusing new workers with in-house knowledge is a widespread desire to simply leapfrog that process. Instead of teaching less-educated workers, many companies opt for hiring engineers they hope will simply learn what needs to be done on their own, Ventura noted.

“This is the hard part with the new engineers coming in: Many facilities feel they want technical people at the engineering level,” he said. “They’re taking away that learning process and then saying to the worker, ‘This is how we’re going to have it done all the time.’ So, there’s a little bit of, ‘I don’t have to do too much; it’s going to be spoon-fed to me.’”

The main reason? It’s almost never ignorance or negligence—many companies simply can’t find and keep people at the entry level to train into experienced workers. Attracting and keeping new hires in the companies that Ventura consults has never been more difficult; a thumbnail sketch of his recent experiences shows that only one out of 10 new hires makes it long-term.

“Seven don’t show up, two of the three left over quit after the end of the first week because it’s too much work,” he said. “So, you’re only getting one-tenth of the people you hire at any given time.”

Of course, if word gets around that a company isn’t willing to train new employees, then even drawing that one person out of 10 isn’t going to be easy. That’s especially true among younger workers for whom getting dirty on the job has lost what allure it once had among people, like Ventura, who liked to work on cars and lawn mowers and get grease under their fingernails as they learned about new machinery.

That leaves a lot of companies asking—sometimes begging—retired employees or people who’ve moved up to different positions in the company to pitch in during mission-critical projects such as commissioning a new tube mill.

In one case, Ventura recalled that a seasoned tube mill veteran was asked to supervise the installation of a new mill—which included turning wrenches to get the new machine running. In another, a mill operator hurt his back and had to take six weeks of medical leave. The maintenance supervisor brought in to replace him didn’t have the tube mill experience of his injured colleague, on whom the younger employees in the mill depended to oversee production. To fill the gap, Ventura happened to find a seasoned tube mill veteran who was on a leave of absence from another company to pinch-hit while the injured supervisor recovered.

To mitigate desperate situations like that, Ventura suggests that companies in the tube and pipe business pay special attention to how they treat and foster the new talent that does manage to stick around. But that requires expenses that some companies don’t want to incur.

“I’m finding there are some companies that don’t want to pay to bring in the person to help train their people because they’re assuming that the people in the shop, when they hire on, know this—and they’re finding out they don’t.

“So, that teaching capability, having the patience to show someone how to do it, isn’t prevalent anymore.”

However, if tube and pipe manufacturers want to staunch the bleeding and rebuild their collective workforce, Ventura would prescribe nothing less than a recommitment to the in-house teaching that was once taken for granted in the industry. They could start with educating new managers on the finer points of the tube mill and then expand it to every incoming employee so that mills expand know-how beyond that one person with all the experience.

“I would think that it would be beneficial to have something like that, where they put the time and effort in for a schooling process internally,” Ventura said. “That should come not from an upper management person, maybe not even a middle management person, but more of someone in a supervisory capacity. That’s where it would start.”