Well the Hubbel craft doesn’t say many wise things, but when she does, they are whoppers. This is Lora’s online comment to the Argus story about hiring welders;
Lora Hubbel · Top Commenter · Sioux Falls, South Dakota
I don’t get it. Sioux Steel, if you need welders….THEN TRAIN THEM! Why look to the government to educate and train someone for your business…DO IT YOURSELF! You don’t have to do the “schooling”…just give them hands on training. Give them a small job at first and as they learn more they can do more complicated jobs. Since WHEN have we pouted about not having enough STATE TRAINED workers? Man up Sioux Steel…take control of your own destiny and train your own workers.
Besides having the desire to want to be a welder and having skills working with your hands, there really isn’t a reason why you can’t train welders on the job. As someone who has worked in manufacturing in the past said to me;
The training schools do not teach useable welding skills. Through the last 40 years of our trying to use their trained skills in many South Dakota factories, the first thing we learned to do with the new employee was to break all the bad habits taught at the SD schools. This is a reason these students have to leave South Dakota. We do not have programs being taught matching the needs of the factories.  The necessary skills for South Dakota welding shops / factories are not taught by the instructors not understanding the businesses. Most South Dakota businesses do not need “certified†welders. These shops need to train their own employees to do the light gauge work South Dakota factories utilize. The need for the training academies is expensive bullshit to force under-educated kids to get sucked into paying high priced loans to study useless skills.
These factory owners do not want to take the farm and city kids into their factories anymore to go through a rigorous training period. We taught many workers everything about welding the way we needed them to weld and some are still at it 30 years and more later at the factory we started in 1965. This is the way it needs to be done to build South Dakota and a dedicated workforce.
No money for public education, but $50 million to subsidize training for private industry, go figure.