About us

Built by a machinist for machinists

My name is Kenneth Smith, a retired machinist from Southern California. I started machining out of high school in the late 1970's. I have seen a lot of young people struggle to gain knowledge and respect in the machining community. The effort to cross-train has always been subject to the people doing the training. I never worked for a company that took employee training very seriously. Most of the places I worked at had the fellow machinist do the training. Obviously they were unqualified. I say: if a good machinist is one in a thousand a good machinist instructor is one in a million. But this is what we got. Usually a guy who didn't want to take on this responsibility. You could tell he wasn't going to give you his best. You want me to train my replacement? You want me to give away my training? The shop is like any company, a highly competitive place where everyone is competing for favor.

I always thought outside the box, so when I learned about micro-learning and how it was changing the landscape for many companies I wanted to adapt it to the shop floor where a little self respect was sadly needed. What does one have to do with the other? Well if you have an employee who is sick on Monday and car trouble on Friday. This is an employee who is heading out the door. Maybe that's a good thing. But some of these "marginal employees" are worth keeping. They came to you with the best of intentions. They dreamed of being accepted and becoming a part of something. Nobody paid him any mind, he felt like he could do better somewhere else so now he's just hanging on to survive.

How hard would it be to tell him, "you belong".

So I developed The Universal Machinist to help both employer and employee effortlessly build the relationship and a career at the same time. One serves the other, high competency equals high moral. I also found that this method could free up high priced talent from training while their machine sits idle. It was apparent that a significant cost savings could be achieved this way as well as build staff expertise and create a sense of belonging to a team. So now I'm taking my idea to the masses. I hope that someday The Universal Machinist is in more shops than compressed air. I hope an employee comes to his boss and thanks him for making a home and security for him. I hope he's there on Monday and Friday on time and ready to participate.

Let's make it a better shop together.

Kenneth Smith
Owner