Winning More than Prizes Through Manufacturing Competitions

Even outside of the manufacturing world, the industry’s personnel shortage is becoming well known. This is an issue that has only grown more apparent with time, as older machinists retire with no replacements. What’s more, this is hardly a localized problem, with shops from Illinois to Italy reporting recruitment struggles. So how can the industry combat this problem?

The Northern Utah chapter of the National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA) is trying and succeeding through several tacks: Open houses, school visits, apprenticeships and a revamped machining competition. This last has proved particularly effective for the region, connecting students and schools to manufacturers in mutually beneficial partnerships that improve the effectiveness of other recruitment methods.

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Student competitors’ desire to talk shop with industry veterans proved even stronger than their desire to win prizes, according to Bryson. This has helped land many of them job interviews at the judges’ companies. All images courtesy of the Northern Utah NTMA.

Building a Competition

SkillsUSA and the Northern Utah NTMA have long supported a machining competition for students at local technical schools and high schools, according to Art Santana, Northern Utah NTMA board member and operations manager at Paramount Machine, but enthusiasm had waned near the start of the 2020s. Broc Bryson, another member of the Northern Utah NTMA and a business team leader at MSC Industrial Supply, says this waning student participation came at the same time that the organization was looking for high-impact ways to improve recruitment and training. As such, a committee of board members — Santana, Bryson, Travis Minnig of Centric Precision, Wes Michie of Skydandee Manufacturing and Mark Darley of SilencerCo — set out to overhaul the contest.

The existing contest was centered around manual machining skills, and in the time allotted, competitors would not be able to finish a part — neither element being all that appealing to students, only four of whom arrived to compete at the final event in the old style. As such, the team decided to overhaul the event to focus on CNC work.

The Northern Utah NTMA team built a new, four-event competition in conjunction with local industry leaders and local schools. While the schools were initially reticent to pour resources into the manual machining competition, several agreed to attend the new event. Students would compete in CNC two-axis turning, CNC three-axis milling, CNC programming and automated manufacturing technology challenges, alongside a written test and a mock job interview.

In a bid to attract competing students (and legitimize the contest in the eyes of reluctant schools), the Northern Utah NTMA board set out to find sponsors for the contest. Bryson says that, just like with the schools, there was initially some difficulty in convincing sponsors to invest in the competition, but the team succeeded in convincing OEMs and distributors — especially tooling companies — to contribute to the prizes for competitors. Similarly, they recruited a core group of industry veterans to act as judges for the events.

Interest Pays Dividends

A total of 21 students from four tech colleges and five high schools attended the 2022 event, the first of the revamped style. Schools, industry and the Northern Utah NTMA alike took this as a sign of improvement. But most importantly, Bryson says, the contestants themselves showed they were passionate and wanted to talk shop with the judges and OEM representatives at the event.

Bryson and Santana credit the students’ passion and desire—which was quickly reciprocated by the judges—as the key driving factor behind the competition’s growth in the following years. For the schools, supporting their most driven and skilled students gets their programs publicity and attracts more skilled students. For the sponsors, passionate new students in the trade means potential passionate new customers in the years to come. For the judges, the event introduces them to up-and-comers who could make promising apprentices and hires. And for the students themselves, they get a chance to engage with adults who take their careers and skills seriously.

It’s a win-win scenario for all involved, and Bryson and Santana say most judges have volunteered year after year. Interest from sponsors also increased, and for the 2025 event, the Northern Utah NTMA used its annual golf tournament as a fundraiser for the contest, where sponsoring companies would have their company logos added to a hoodie given out at the year’s competition. Fifty companies would go on to add their logos to the hoodie.

As family and friends of the contestants have started to attend the Northern Utah NTMA’s competition, the organization has developed programming for them. In 2025, this included a conversation with industry leaders (including the leaders of JD Machine, our 2024 Top Shops Honoree in Human Resources) about working in the industry.

None of this would matter if competitors didn’t continue to show up, but attendance numbers have increased year upon year. In 2023, 28 contestants took part from six tech colleges and seven high schools. Santana adds that 18 of those contestants had signed hiring agreements due to start as soon as they finished their school year.

By 2025, attendance had increased to 36 contestants. When I spoke to Bryson and Santana not long after the competition, three of those contestants had already received interview offers from companies the judges worked at, with Santana expecting at least 20 interviews to come from the competition alone. The event itself has also expanded, taking place over two days and two locations, as no single location was large enough to host all the contestants, judges and attendees. These attendees included family members of the contestants, who attended in high enough numbers in 2024 that the Northern Utah NTMA put together panels for them (and students not engaged in a competition at the time) as part of the 2025 event. This included a panel by shop owners who talked about the industry and provided a Q&A session for interested family members of competitors, as well as a panel of former contestants who talked about their careers since taking part in the competition — including one 2023 contestant who had since founded his own shop.

Open Houses

Santana says this interest from family members in the contest mirrors their growing interest in his shop’s open houses. Paramount Machining now runs four or five open houses each year, he says, including a parents’ night so parents of teenagers going into trade school can see what a modern machine shop looks like. While two people came to the first parents’ night, Santana says, attendance rose to 69 people in 2024.

The shop also hosts open houses for schools, and Santana says showing machines making good tools helps youngsters see they can make a good living in the industry — a point Santana brings home by taking touring students to the parking lot and pointing out the expensive trucks some of his machinists drive.

Paramount continues to foster deeper relationships with schools in other ways as well. The shop hosts instructors who are inexperienced in the trade, enabling them to shadow machinists to get a better sense of how a shop floor works. Schools are also increasingly inviting Northern Utah NTMA board members to serve on advisory boards and provide advice on machine tool purchases, as well as inviting some board members to speak in classrooms about the industry. Santana says that in the week of our interview, he had gone to three different schools to promote CNC machining. These visits can result in more than just awareness, with several of Paramount’s current apprentices discovering the shop and applying after a classroom visit.

Santana notes that the competition demographics have expanded even over the last few years, with more young women and girls taking part. Image courtesy of Northern Utah NTMA.

Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships are still seen as somewhat of a gamble in Northern Utah, according to Santana. He says that schools and shops alike are often waiting to see the results of pilot classes before investing in programs — with exceptions, such as the flourishing apprenticeship program run by Northern Utah NTMA member and 2024 Top Shops HR Honoree JD Machine. Even on Paramount Machining’s shop floor, several employees have yet to warm to the idea of the apprenticeship program the shop started in 2021.

Despite those doubts, the three apprentices who started at Paramount Machining as part of that inaugural class are still there, one programming a mill-turn, another a complex Tsugami machine and the last a multi-pallet machine. Not every apprentice stays, but Santana says 65-70% of apprentices have stayed with the shop, helping the shop build a reliable foundation of talent now and in the future.

As for how Paramount Machine has managed to hold on to as many apprentices as it does, Santana’s strategy sounds like the Northern Utah NTMA’s: trust them with the tech. Paramount Machining gives its apprentices and younger hires the opportunity to work with more complicated machines from the early stages of their careers, and it is these more complicated machines — and the implied trust that comes with running them — that most engage younger employees.

Success in recruiting at the community level has thus directly and indirectly helped local shops recruit, providing not just candidates but the strategies to recruit more. It has also helped foster a sense of community, even more than the Northern Utah NTMA’s monthly meetings. Bryson says that while committee members often have differences of opinion on the specifics of how to accomplish recruitment goals, the effort toward pulling off each year’s competition sees everyone working toward one goal and finding common ground.