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Ask a plant manager what four words they never want to hear and more than a few would say: open press/no operator. It’s shorthand for when the lack of a machine operator is the only thing preventing a manufacturer’s capital equipment from running — and making the company money. Open press/no operator is the unfortunate scenario many injection molders find themselves in as they struggle to keep their shop floors fully staffed.

Todd Shackett, president of Southern Union State Community College (SUSCC), Opelika, Alabama, speaks at PTXPO’s Workforce Development Workshop. Source: Gardner Business Media

At Plastikos and Plastikos Medical, Erie, Pennsylvania, Plant Manager John Williams says the company’s ERP system actually has a downtime code for that particular scenario. Thankfully, due to its efforts to recruit, train and retain employees, it’s not a code the molder and moldmaker must input very often.

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Williams, along with Todd Shackett, Southern Union State Community College (SUSCC), Opelika, Alabama; Hannah Belmont, Westminster Tool, Plainfield, Connecticut; and Alex Beaumont, Beaumont Group, Erie, Pennsylvania, shared their viewpoints on staffing as part of the Workforce Development Workshop held at the recent PTXPO.

The four panelists came at the skills gap issue from different perspectives, with Shackett and Beaumont addressing the supply side of the problem by training up new and existing workers via SUSCC’s Plastics Engineering Technology program and the American Injection Molding Institute (AIM), respectively. Meanwhile, Williams and Belmont approached the topic from the demand side as molders and moldmakers seeking to find people.

Prior to becoming the president of SUSCC, Shackett came from manufacturing and molding, with stints at General Motors, Becton-Dickinson and Baxter over his more than 30 years in industry. He was actually still in industry in Alabama working on an advisory panel for SUSCC when the school approached him about becoming its president.

That interplay between local manufacturing ����ýes and area schools of all levels — from elementary to college — was a recurring theme in the workshop and at the PTXPO event. Westminster Tool and Plastikos are heavily engaged with area schools, with Westminster, for instance, hosting STEM classes of fifth-grade students each day of the week for all of October to honor Manufacturing Day in 2024; while Williams at Plastikos acts as a mentor at the local high school’s automation program, regularly meeting with 12^th graders as they prepare their senior project for automation. SUSCC and AIM both have industry advisory boards they confer with frequently, learning what area ����ýes are looking for in new hires and how that might impact curriculum and training.

While at PTXPO, I had the chance to meet with Doug Pauley and Karl Anderson, who came to the show from Nebraska’s Central Community College (CCC). At CCC’s Columbus, Nebraska, campus, Pauley acts as director of training and development while Anderson serves as director of plastic injection molding. The molding program was initiated in 2018 in conjunction with Columbus’s biggest employer — Becton-Dickinson — as it sought to create a local pipeline of skilled workers. More recently, CCC was awarded a grant to help it promote and recruit its molding training among English-as-a-second-language populations.

Karl Anderson (left) and Doug Pauley (center), of Nebraska’s Central Community College (CCC), alongside Tony Deligio of Plastics Technology at PTXPO 2025.Source: Central Community College

Pauley, Anderson and the workshop panelists noted there are grants available at the state and federal level to help finance such efforts, but finding them, as well as willing partners, can be a challenge. A molder in the workshop audience noted that just as industry players in Nebraska and Alabama had approached local community colleges about creating training, his operation reached out to a local school regarding plastics education but was shot down.

Shackett has lunch with students every week at SUSCC. Nearly every time he asks them what they’re interested in doing after school, at least one responds: crime scene investigator — no doubt a result of the long-running TV show. But for Shackett, that’s the point, it’s the familiarity with that field that sparks interest. He wonders how many of those same kids drive by some of the very high-tech manufacturing facilities in their own communities and have no idea what happens inside (or that they’re hiring and it’s high-paying respective to other careers in the area). A hit TV show about injection molding might not be on the horizon, but efforts by manufacturers to engage with schools — both to introduce their students to the local successful ����ý and also to make sure those schools help prepare potential future employees for those ����ýes — could have the same beneficial impact.