All Stars take different paths to success

Georgia-Pacific maintenance leader for power and utilities Mike Maciejewski.

NEW Manufacturing Alliance highlights younger workers

By Richard Ryman
rryman@greenbaypressgazette.com

One never doubted, one sort of fell into it and one was sure he wouldn't. Three men. Three careers. All in manufacturing.

The NEW Manufacturing Alliance recently released its second annual All Stars publication, highlighting younger manufacturing workers. Three of the All Stars for 2010 demonstrate the wide range of jobs available in manufacturing and the different routes to them.

Brian Vandenlangenberg, 33, a CNC sheet metal programmer at Robinson Metal in Lawrence, was raised in a manufacturing family.

"Ever since I can remember, I loved building stuff," he said. "In my opinion, it's the definition of building wealth, making something out of nothing."

Matt Busch, 27, a welder with Fox Valley Metal Tech in Ashwaubenon, was raised on a farm near Bonduel and learned elementary welding on the farm. When he was offered a job as a welder at KI in Bellevue, he took it.

"I always liked working with my hands, building things. I couldn't be an office person," he said.

Mike Maciejewski, 26, a maintenance leader at Georgia-Pacific's Broadway mill, vowed he'd never have a career in a paper mill. His dad works at the Day Street mill, his mom worked for Procter & Gamble and he worked at Day Street in the summers during college, so he knew what he wanted. Or so he thought.

"Until you get out there and get a taste of it, you don't understand. Finally, a light bulb comes on: This wouldn't be a bad way to make a living," Maciejewski said.

Vandenlangenberg attended Northeast Wisconsin Technical College out of high school, completing his machine tool training in nine months. He landed a job at S&M Tool in Hobart as a computer numerical control (CNC) machinist. For five years, life was good. Then an automobile accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

"After the accident, I knew exactly what I wanted to do," he said.

He returned to Northeast Wisconsin Technical College and learned to be a sheet metal designer, programming CNC machines on computer.

Finding a job took a little longer than he would have liked, but Robinson Metal, whose plant and offices seem made for a worker in a wheelchair, took him on.

Vandenlangenberg does his design work on a computer on the second floor, but be spends a lot of time on the production floor because he likes to see the result of his work.

"When you are upstairs, it's a bunch of X's and Y's. When you are generating code upstairs, you have to know how the machine is going to run. If a decimal is in the wrong place, it can go wrong very quickly," he said. "It's nice to go down and see what those make that machine do."

He also admits to missing the production work.

"I miss it a lot. The operators are better than I was. I'm always impressed with the stuff they are working on."

Busch attended NWTC while working full time at KI. He found that he didn't know as much as he thought he did about welding or manufacturing.

"The mindset I had as a farm boy was stick welding and dirty, grimy work. That's a perception a lot of the public has," he said.

"I had no clue about tungsten inert gas welding and flux core welding. The stuff we do is very (clean)."

Busch said the work he does is exacting — "this job has to be parallel within two-tenths of a millimeter" — and not mindlessly repetitive.

"I can work on something that might take a week to make. After that, I can work on things where I might do 15 or 20 jobs a day," he said.

NWTC tought him basic welding skills, which he refined at Fox Valley Metal Tech, where he's worked for 6½ years. He has no regrets about choosing a two-year program at the technical school, as opposed to a four-year degree.

"I have many friends that graduated that aren't even in their field," he said. "I enjoy coming to work every day."

Maciejewski thought he knew what he wanted: to run his own construction business.

His parents talked him into going to college instead, and after graduating from Bay Port High School, he received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Then he took stock of his situation and realized he wanted to come back to Northeastern Wisconsin and get a job in a stable industry.

He did the math and somewhat to his surprise found himself back at the paper mill. "I put the two together and manufacturing seemed to offer what I wanted," he said. Manufacturing "is one of those foundational things."

He regrets that he didn't take more science and math classes in high school.

"I had no idea there was this much science in papermaking," he said. "In high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I passed up physics and higher math. I was good at them, but didn't push myself."

Now, he says, his desire for knowledge is as great as ever. He learns from the experienced maintenance staff on his team, but also is taking electrical mechanical engineering classes at NWTC.

"If there is something I can do to keep the job, that is where (knowledge) will lead me. We have to stay on top of our game," he said.