Aviation Week & Space Technology
08/20/2007, page 91
Printed headline: Investing in Employees
Hitco Carbon Composites ranks number three in this year’s list of “Where A&D Professionals Want To Work” for the professional development and valuing the individual categories.
Ed Carson, chief operating officer, has a clear view of why: “We’re moving toward offering more complex design and development [to customers] and have invested millions of dollars in equipment and tooling to enable our work with the most advanced materials in the industry,” he says.
The mantra for Hitco employees is: “Invest, perform, grow.”
Laying out large composite skins on spars is a time-intensive task, so investment is crucial to automate as much as possible. Traditionally, “perform” has meant achieving 25% contours on a surface. But the more complex aircraft that Hitco works on today require well above that level of contour. The company introduced an automatic fiber-placement machine, with the potential for two production beds to enable this type of capability.
However, Carson says, investment in automation doesn’t outrank investing in people. “We have to keep the experts to ‘lay-up,’ and we need people energized and educated to use our new technologies,” he says. There are new expectations, but there are also opportunities for career growth, such as programming for large machines and more complex design-engineering skills.
Hitco provides slightly more than 37 hr. per employee per year of education, at every pay level. “Each person has a training plan, and we measure against that plan,” Carson adds.
To assure that employees remain with Hitco after this investment, Carson is focusing on developing leaders. “We can’t afford high turnover, and you can buy people for only so long,” he says.
“It’s been proven over and over again that the immediate supervisor is who makes the most difference in an employee’s satisfaction, so we’re focusing on building that relationship. And the base is that leaders do what they say they will do. The smaller you are, the better employees can see through it when leaders don’t.”
Hitco’s plans are to grow 2.5 times greater than the 2007 business level and size within the next five years. That means about 1,000 employees in the future, versus today’s number of nearly 400.
Hitco has spent a long time focusing on the diversity-rich community of its location, just outside South Central Los Angeles, and about 50% of its employees are women. “People want to live where they work, and work where they live,” he says. “We live in a diverse area where there is diversity in our executive leadership, engineering, assembly and hand lay-up (hand application of material).
“We have to grow using the model we have today—learning, leading, doing what we say.”
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