Angie Lafferty is the General Manager of Engineering and Skilled Trades at TRQSS, the only Canadian seatbelt manufacturing plant in the automotive industry, located near Windsor, Ontario.
Excellence in Manufacturing asked Angie a series of questions about women working in manufacturing. Her responses below reveal how the industry has changed over the past twenty years, why company culture is important, and what can be done to advocate for more diversity.
Q: How long have you been working at TRQSS?
A: I've been here for 27 years. I've had a lot of different roles over the years, always in engineering, but for the last 16 years I've been involved in skilled trades as well.
Q: When did your interest in manufacturing start?
A: I got involved in manufacturing in high school through a co-op where I worked at one of the local engine plants for Ford. In university I did all my co-ops at local manufacturing plants like Ford and Siemens. When I graduated, I was able to get a job at TRQSS right away.
Q: Have you felt welcomed as a female in a traditionally male field?
A: In grade 11, the first time I was in a manufacturing plant, they were not very welcoming to women. I think they thought it was strange to have girls in that environment, but we had a lot of support through the school.
In university my class didn’t have many females; I'd say less than thirty percent. But honestly, once I got into the facilities and started to show them that I could do everything everyone else could do, there were no issues.
TRQSS is a Japanese company, and being a female in a technical field is already kind of unique, but especially in the Japanese culture. That was a whole different thing to get used to.
Q: Has the number of women in engineering and skilled trades increased since you first started?
A: When I first started at TRQSS in 1997 there were no females in engineering and no females in trades. For the first 12 years when I worked in design engineering, we started to get more female engineers. Then once I became a manager in the group and I started to do the hiring, it started to increase a little bit more.
When I started in more of a manufacturing role, there were even fewer engineers in that side of the company. Over the years we've hired a lot more. Right now, we have a female manager responsible for industrial engineering and facilities planning, another female section manager responsible for assembly automation and 5 female engineers working in assembly and injection molding production engineering. This puts us at 32% females in engineering which is far above the national average.
Q: Are women encouraged to work in skilled trades?
A: When we started our program hiring internal apprentices, we decided to look for people who worked at TRQSS who were willing to become either millwrights or industrial electricians.
Mahogany was one of the first to apply; she was part of our first group. It was great; that was the first time I had worked with a female in the trades. She was successful all through the apprenticeship and then eventually got her certification.
Our next female in the trades was Neva. She's working on her millwright apprenticeship right now. So, we currently have 2 females out of a team of 32, and hopefully we will get more in the future.
Q: How do you recruit women?
A: We do a lot of local job fairs. We work with Build a Dream Foundation, so we'll often have booths set-up with our female trades people and engineers there to explain what their jobs entail.
We also work with schools. I brought in groups of guidance counselors from local high schools so they get an idea of what manufacturing looks like. And then hopefully they can bring that information back to the schools and explain better to the students what these jobs are.
I have three of my own kids, so I've tried to go into their classrooms and explain what engineering and trades look like. I think just getting the word out there helps to bring more females in.
Q: What advice would you give to companies that want to increase the number of women in manufacturing and skilled trades?
A: I think it starts with having a culture that values diversity and is committed to ensuring that everyone feels welcome. It’s important to have a management team who's interested in making a point of having not just women in these positions, but diversity in general. Of course, I would like to see more women in these typically male dominated roles, but I also think it’s important to look for all types of diversity in the workforce. At TRQSS we have been fortunate to hire people with all types of back grounds, experience in different industries, from different countries. Being in this geographic area gives us the opportunity hire graduates from the University of Windsor and St. Clair College which both have a large population of international students.
Having a Japanese influence at TRQSS brings a culture that I don't think a lot of other companies have. Being open to diversity is what's helped to bring more females into the manufacturing environment, especially in engineering and skilled trades positions. Having so much diversity in general helps women feel more comfortable once they get here.
Q: What misconceptions do people have about working in manufacturing and the trades?
A: One of the things I think people don't understand about skilled trades and manufacturing is moving past the old idea that these are hard jobs where you're going to get dirty and go home tired. When you see what's being done today with robots and automation, you realize that these jobs are using your mind more than your hands.
Sometimes people don't understand how creative these jobs can be. People in trades are solving problems and coming up with solutions. People with fabrication skills are creating things. Working in the trades isn’t about needing to have strong muscles and pick things up. Now we're looking for people who can stop and think and problem solve and come up with unique solutions.
Q: What message would you like to get across to younger generations?
A: If I was going to talk to teenagers, and young girls especially, I would encourage them to go into the trades and to think about those roles as an outlet for creative work, not just technical work. Manufacturing is an industry that they really should be thinking about.
There are many opportunities for women: engineering, quality, production control, logistics, finance, human resources. There's a lot of opportunity for growth, for pay, for work/life balance, security, and to be able to have great jobs.
For more information on EMC’s HerJourney Program, please visit their website. HerJourney is funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Canadian Apprenticeship Strategy.
If you are a woman in the manufacturing skilled trades and would like to share your story, please reach out to EMC’s Marketing & Communications Manager, Tiffany Robbins – trobbins@emccanada.org.