Leaders from the South African Tooling Initiative Programme (NTIP) met with officials of Hamill Manufacturing Company. Oberg Industries and the Magna Training Center in an effort to benchmark their metalworking apprenticeship training in South Africa with Herman Pienaar, Curriculum Program Manager and Peter Lategan, National Program Manager for the NTIP, travelled to Western Pennsylvania with NIMS Deputy Director James Wall to review training at Hamill and Oberg.  They met with Hamill Chair Jeffrey S. Kelly, Hamill President John Darymple and Human Resource Manager Phyllis E. Miller. At Oberg, the group met with Gregory Chambers, Director of Corporate Compliance and NIMS Board Chair, Neil Ashbaugh, Senior Marketing Specialist and current Chair of the Butler County Manufacturing Consortium, and Jason Falkner, Apprentice Supervisor of Oberg Industries. 

“There is a growing trend toward credentialing of employees within industries here in the United States and to have this opportunity to share our successes and failures with the government of South Africa is a positive step forward in improving the skills of workers in skilled trades worldwide,” stated Mr. Chambers.  “The efforts of the government of South Africa to find, motivate, train, and reward those workers are no different than what Oberg Industries faces today in fulfilling their needs for a skilled workforce.  While Oberg’s goal is to improve their nearly 700 employees, Herman and Peter have been tasked to improve the training system for their entire nation.  Oberg is honored to be a small part of that goal,” concluded Mr. Chambers.

In Baltimore, the NTIP leaders met with Paul Myles and Sharon M. Snow at the Magna Technical Training Center and reviewed Magna’s NIMS-based competency apprenticeship, conducted by Magna in partnership with the Community College of Baltimore County.

NTIP is committed to re-building South Africa’s precision manufacturing industry and is modeling its efforts on the NIMS National Guideline Standards for Competency-Based Apprenticeship.