November 2024 Volume 6

INDUSTRY NEWS

100% FIRST YEAR TALENT RETENTION IN MANUFACTURING IS POSSIBLE By Joey Pettit & Jonathan Allen

I n American manufacturing today, 1st year attrition sits some where around 40%. There are countless studies and surveys to come up with the “why” behind such high turnover, but the ques tion we really need to be asking (and learning from) is “why don’t some companies have this problem?” In 2020, the US Navy saw the problem in terms of National Security. They have a lot of submarines to build and maintain and estimate somewhere around 140K new positions are needed in the Defense Industrial Base over the next decade. Everything from welders, to machinists, to engineers, schedulers, and more. The consistent message the Navy heard from industry HR and CEOs was manu facturers were not winning the war on talent. Most of the industrial base is comprised of small to medium sized employees, a few hundred employees or less, without robust talent systems and processes. So, to help them win the Navy deployed the Defense Industrial Base Talent Pipeline Program to help improve the way manufacturers recruit, hire, onboard, and most importantly retain skilled talent. The Talent Pipeline Program, or TPP, starts with the premise that perfect is possible. We can recruit one person, bring them on the team, and they depart only after a long career. And it was the best experience of their life, and the organization was better because they were there. Possible? Yes. Easy? No. Just like operational processes that are designed to have zero defects, TPP helps manufacturers look at their talent processes as a system that should also be designed to have zero attrition. In operational processes if the product has a 5% or greater return rate from the

customer, everyone is involved in figuring out what happened. But when we have 5% (or 40%) first year turnover in the most important part of our business – our people, that becomes an HR problem to solve. Our response to that is STOP. While HR is important to the solution, this is an all-of-business problem that requires an all-of business engagement in owning and solving it. Today, the TPP is operating in six key geographic regions around the country and has a National Reach – we can and do help any Defense Industrial Base manufacturer who wants to improve. With

FIA MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2024 46