Voice of Business
GE Aviation: Making high-performance parts -- and the employees to build them
By: Vince McKelvey, Focus Contributor
Photos By: Ron Duckett
Vandalia plant doesn’t just look for skilled workers, it trains them
It’s early one morning in March at GE Aviation’s plant in Vandalia. Adam Hughes are Luke Vuong are each at a worktable in a room off a main assembly area. They have directions up on their computers and instructors at their sides as they build rotors for the sophisticated generators the plant makes for high-performance military and civilian aircraft.
Hughes, 43, of Piqua, came to GE last fall in a mid-career adjustment, looking for a job with more reasonable hours. Vuong, 19, of Huber Heights, is at the beginning of his work life and has set his sights on eventually learning a trade.
Both men are part of an innovative training program at GE Aviation in Vandalia, where leaders decided the best way to secure skilled workers – something in short supply across many industries – was to train them.
That was about two years ago, and officials couldn’t be happier.
“If it were not for the training rooms, we would not have survived,” said William ‘Lee’ Shepherd, who, as product leader, has overall responsibility at the plant. “The training rooms are good for business, but they’re also good for the people coming in … We've built out the training rooms to train people and, candidly, start their career.”
A century-old operation
The Vandalia plant is one of four GE Aviation facilities in the Dayton area and employs about 375 people. It is a direct descendent of Leland Electric Co., a manufacturer of electric motors founded in Dayton in 1921. Leland changed hands several times over the years, but often kept the Leland name and always stayed in the region. The business moved into the Vandalia plant in 1951 and began to focus exclusively on aviation in the late ‘70s. It became part of GE in 2007.
Today, it makes high-output generators and power conversion boxes for civilian and military aircraft – but mostly for the military. Products from Vandalia can be found on F/A-18 Hornet, C-130J cargo planes, Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft, and Apache helicopters, among others.
Jesse Baker, the plant’s executive site leader, said making reliable products that keep people safe – especially on military missions – gives workers an added sense of pride. “Our employees are very proud of what they do and understand the criticality of the work,” he said.
The plant created a curriculum and instituted its training program in large part because of the complexity of its products. Trade schools no longer produce the stream of prospective employees they once did and, even then, don’t teach what the plant needs.
“There is nobody that does training on how to wind electrical motors, electrical generators,” Baker said. “We do not build widgets here. It is very sophisticated complex processes, complex products …. It’s very much artisanship.”
The plant turns out about 600 generators a year to specifications that vary by customer.
Shepherd said a basic electric motor might have wire wrapped around two or four poles. “That is not even close to what we do,” he said. “It is very exacting overlays of wire over other overlays and particular orders … Our technology and our power density … is actually why we have to train people because it is not an easy wind.”
Two rooms for two functions
The Vandalia plant has two training rooms. One, where Hughes and Vuong were working, serves the generator assembly process, teaching employees to build rotors and stators, the moving and stationary parts of a generator. The other room is for electronics assembly, which produces power conversion boxes.
Electronics training is for assemblers, inspectors, and the recertification of existing employees, something the plant used to contract out.
On this day, Sue Millhouse is there upgrading her skills.
Millhouse has two grown children, lives in St. Paris and has been at the Vandalia plant for four years. She is learning to “surface mount” -- putting “these tiny little pieces” on a small circuit board, she said.
Instructor Jodie Fallen said this training will let Millhouse refurbish used boards. “If you don’t have that surface mount certification, you can’t really rework (them),” she said.
Millhouse worked for 19 years at a plastics company where she ran a lot of machines. She likes this better. “(It’s) a lot smaller stuff to work on … It does feel like you’re building something,” she said.
Training is continuous
The assembly work requires an ability to follow instructions, to work with your hands and to pay attention to detail. Prospective employees take a basic aptitude test. Starting pay for assemblers is $17.25 an hour.
Training takes place as people are hired and tends to be ongoing. There’s almost always someone in the training room.
Adam Hughes started at GE just after Thanksgiving. His previous job required 12-hour shifts and he was looking for better hours. At GE Aviation, he also found something suited to his interests.
“I like putting things together … I put together PCs and so forth. This is very similar,” Hughes said. “I like using my hands.”
By early March, Hughes had been working in the training room for about three months and expected it would be about another month before he went out on the floor.
That’s just fine with instructor Stephanie Lawson, who said the training period varies by employee. They stay until they’re ready.
“I don’t want them to go on the floor and feel overwhelmed,” she said. “I let the operator tell me when they’re comfortable … I want their confidence level to be up when they go out there.”
Confidence is important because mistakes can be costly. “(If) we throw away a rotor that's $40,000,” Baker said. “We'll have close to just north of 100 hours of direct labor building that product up.”
Quality over speed
After about a month of orientation and practice work, trainees begin making real products. That’s another reason they can take the time they need in training. “They’re building production parts,” Lawson said. “Quality over speed; that’s something we preach highly here. It’s safety, quality – everything else comes later.”
Luke Vuong appreciates the approach. “I like how in depth the training is. More than other places (where) they just kind of threw me in.”
That’s essentially how the Vandalia plant used to do it, too. Someone hired to build rotors would sit next to a person building rotors to learn. Such informal training resulted in inconsistent practices and products and could be frustrating for the new employee, Shepherd said. Now, “We don’t put them out on the floor until they understand what they’re doing.”
“We have more work than we have assemblers. So, the training rooms are very important to us,” Shepherd added. “We want people to understand that we will train them, we will give them a very viable, sustainable job. And it’s not moving boxes. It’s building aircraft parts.”
About 65 new employees went through the training last year, and the plant still needs assemblers, particularly on the generator side. Commercial aviation slowed down during the pandemic, but the military did not, Shepherd said.
“We grew 25 percent in that time,” he said. “When we win everything we’re bidding on for future work, it’ll be double what we do now … We have great products, great technology. We’ve got people getting trained up to do it.”
