How I Made It: Montez King

Montez King, executive director at NIMS. Photo provided by Montez King. 

I was failing seventh grade and my mom found out. She'd knock you back if you made her upset, but this time she didn't. She cried and said, “I never thought it would be you that would screw up like this.” That meant something to me. I didn't realize she thought of me as above all the other things we lived around. I lived in a very poor community in Baltimore.

In 8th grade, I started doing my work and paying attention because I wanted to apply to trade school for business administration. They were taking 90 people, and I was ranked 91.

Featured Content

DN Solutions and HELLER: A United Vision for U.S. Manufacturing Renewal READ MORE

When Will We See Humanoid Robots on the Manufacturing Floor? READ MORE

Addressing Manufacturing Challenges with Automation READ MORE

At the trade school open house, I was looking at the other trades and there was the machine shop. I was curious because none of the parents went down there. The instructor, Mr. Weber, grabbed me and started shaking me, saying, “I'm looking for a few good black guys for this trade.”

When I wasn’t accepted into business administration, they said, “You can apply to another trade.” All I could think about was that that guy shaking me. He said I could make a lot of money, and that's how I got into machine shop.

In 9^th grade Mr. Weber said, “If you’re really serious about this, when you get to 11^th grade, if you can get a car, I'll put you on work study.” And that's what I did. I worked really hard.

My biggest tool on work study was not a machine tool. It was a broom. It was being able to communicate with people and learning how to overcome some of the biases in the shop.

I did well in high school and got accepted to a good college. When I told my supervisor, he introduced the apprenticeship program. He offered me $10.00 an hour. That sounded very appealing. Be broke for four years or do this, and I can get on the machines.

Parents measured the success of their kids by what college they went to. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, everyone was promoting college degrees. When I made this bold decision to go into a machine shop and forego college, it was hard. When something isn’t popular, you do it because you enjoy it and not the prestige.

After the apprenticeship, I kept working at the company, which had great pay and benefits. But everything was manual machining. I gave that up to go to a job shop with no benefits and a pay decrease to learn CNC.

I was speaking to Mr. Weber, and he thought I'd be a great mentor and teacher to other people in my community. It took me a while, but eventually I thought, that's a great idea. And just like I took that pay cut to learn more, I took another extreme pay cut again to teach in my community.

I worked for a decade helping second-chance people, teaching them the trade. I taught them how to use the broom, how to integrate into your environment and make the change rather than complain.

We used NIMS credentials. NIMS has board meetings in different locations, and they had one where I worked. I showed them everything we were doing. Apparently, it was very impressive. When my contract was up, they reached out and said, “We'd love to have you at NIMS.”

NIMS developed modular and stackable certifications in machining, so it doesn’t take four years to get one certificate. They were the first to market and it took off. With the support of my board, I made another bold decision to launch Smart Training Solutions. STS is a training framework and software technology for executing and tracking on-the-job training in the natural flow of work. It can track training progress, certify completion, and generate critical information about your program in seconds without PDFs or spreadsheets.