Vivre la Difference

This is one of those jobs I always knew was around, I recognise the word, but I never actually knew what it meant. Enlightenment at last as the BLS points out to me that it means the people who assemble, disassemble and repair industrial machinery. I don’t think we’re going to find it too tough to place this on our EQSQ personality tests now, do you? As we’ve said before, if Tim ‘The Tool Man’ Taylor would like it, it’s male brain orientated. Pounding bolts in with a sledgehammer is one tasks mentioned: but much more important for categorizing by brain types is that the work requires systemizing abilities. It isn’t just that empathy isn’t all that useful a skill when faced with 1,500 tonnes of industrial machinery, it is that when repairing it, understanding how the system works and then being able to diagnose why it currently isn’t: well, that’s systemizing, isn’t it? Yes, there is the necessity for interpersonal skills when working as part of a team but then most people, male and female brain types alike, have sufficient empathy to be able to do that.
The training, as you would expect in this sort of industrial job, isn’t so much about college degrees as apprenticeships. Typically four or five years of on the job training, working as a junior in a team. There will usually be about a week of classroom instruction each three months to add to that process. It might be a formal apprenticeship with such classroom training, or a community college program with more informal on the job training: but it’s experience that gets the training done here, much more so than book learning. Clearly a college degree can help, especially in engineering or a related subject, but it’s very rare for millwrights to have such a degree.
Pay seems to run around the $20 an hour level and the job often entails quite lot of overtime (machinery is expensive so time when it isn’t running: worth paying a lot of overtime to get it back up rather than continue to lose on the machine) so annual incomes should be in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. Pretty good these days for a job without a college degree.