A Conversation with IPC's President John Mitchell

Estimated reading time: 23 minutes

Matties: I think we're close, and we have an election coming up.

Mitchell: It's right on the edge. We'll see what happens. In 2017, we might be having a whole different conversation.

Matties: I think Americans, looking at the support that Donald Trump is getting, are ready for something entirely different.

Mitchell: That's how Obama won, too. People wanted change and to make a difference. In his first campaign, he was talking about the need for change.

Matties: When we look at it, we've really paralyzed our economy in manufacturing and jobs.

Mitchell: I think so. There's also some social stigma about it. Right now, if you went to any 20-something year old and said, "Would you like a job in manufacturing?" The image of sweatshop comes to their mind, but that's not today's factory. We need to do a better job of educating the world by saying, “Hey, this is a high-tech world. You're controlling robots. You're doing all this interesting stuff. Whether it's people-less or not, it's still a lot fewer people than it used to be and it's still not drudgery. You're doing cool stuff.” I don't know how to change that view. We need to somehow “popularize” manufacturing.

Matties: You're going to need a good education just to work in a factory.

Mitchell: Exactly. That's the other thing that we've got to fix, education.

Matties: It has really crippled us.

Mitchell: Don't get me going on education.

Matties: Actually, I want to, because I look at Kahn Academy and I think it's a brilliant approach. Are you familiar with that?

Mitchell: Yes, I know Kahn.

Matties: Free, top-level education. Bill Gates' kids were using it and of course they can afford any education.

Mitchell: Right, Gates also invested in it after his kids went there. He said, "Hey wait. This is great. Here's a million dollars. Make it work."

Matties: They turned the school system upside down.

Mitchell: There are also other groundswell organizations that hopefully will change education as well. Right now, the government will never change it. First, education is dispersed to the states, so you have 50 different opinions about how to do it. It is entrenched. I've seen some really innovative educational leaders come out and say, "Hey, we're going to pay common state teachers based on success rates," and they've been shut down by the unions.

To me, the only way to change education is through some of these privatization pieces, and then the government will have to change to keep up. It's kind of that way with anything.

Are you familiar with a program called KIPP? It’s a secondary education, so middle school through high school. Our education 50–60 years ago, when we were primarily agricultural, was designed with the goal of having 70% of people get enough education to go work on the farm. Back then, that was fine. Only the top 5–10% were supposed to become the knowledge workers…doctors, the lawyers, etc. That education system hasn't changed in 50–60 years, so it's designed to do the same thing.

Basically, what KIPP did is say, "Look. Every single person can exceed the expectations of our system." Right now our system says, "There's under-performers, there's over-performers and there's the average. We'll teach to the average.” The majority of these people aren't the average, so they're all frustrated. Either they are too slow or too fast.

What KIPP did is they said, "Everybody can achieve the 94 percentile and you have to or you don't graduate, period." All of them do. All it takes is belief and focus. There are different learning techniques out there that people are not utilizing, like online learning. Right now, the standard teaching mechanism is to dictate, so it's either visual or audio. That only applies to about a third of the population that actually work in those two mechanisms. There's also tactile learning, there’s experiential learning, etc.

I've studied some of these programs on learning, and if you want to remember something as a student, first you look at it. If you stop there and watch a TV program or an educational program on it, three days later you’re down to 70%; six days later, it’s down to 30% retention, etc. Now, if you watch it and take notes at the same time, you've added tactile learning. Typically, the retention rates double just by doing that.

Then rather than reviewing it right after that, instead review it three days later and re-write it and act it out. Music is another piece. If you sing it or create mnemonics for it, you add another. So there's like five different pieces that you can do over and over, and you get 90% retention. You do that periodically for two weeks, and it's yours forever.

It's the same with anything, even this industry. In the China PCB industry, 50 % is just your standard rigid board without many layers. That's mostly what they do here in China. The innovation is flex, hybrid-flex, etc., things like that. That's where the growth is happening. In the cellphones here, they don't have rigid boards. It's high density and then flex circuits that are going on in there, but trying to convince an industry that's already established to re-invest in something brand new is risky. It's going to be a hard change, but that’s where the opportunities are.

When you can just say, "Hey look, I see company X is over here and they just built a factory all around flex." And of the top 10 countries in terms of the printed circuit board market, the fastest growing ones are places like Thailand because they're doing mostly flex stuff. As a result, they're in double-digit growth. They're in the top 10 of all the PCB producing countries in the world. If you want to grow, you've got to stay on top of trends. It's just something that I think the PCB industry has struggled with for decades. When change is in the wind, it's hard for people to get motivated to say, "Hey, I might have to scrap what I'm doing, or at least minimize it because I’ve got to do this new thing."

That's a challenge, because it's kind of like going back to school. Say you get your bachelor's degree and you start working. You're making a nice salary, $60,000 a year, you're doing really well and now you realize you need a master's or you need to go get your doctorate. How many people are going to stop the salary for two or four years to go do that? It's really hard. There are other options, however. You don't have to stop cold turkey; you could do night classes for example.

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