A Morning in a Hallway Full of Robots

Last week Dan Gill and I spent a morning at Spalding Works, where hundreds of eighth-, ninth- and tenth-grade students moved between tables set up by local employers. Approach Automation had a few stations set up in the hallway. Nobody had to imagine what automation meant from a slide.

Some kids asked sharp questions. Some wandered through. A few could hardly keep their hands off the equipment. All of that was fine with us. We did not come looking for a moment where a student discovered a calling. We came to put real machines in front of them and see what happened.

Our corner had a screen running footage from a live warehouse, a rig with its motors and control boards open to look at, and a material cart parked out in the hall. Nothing behind glass. If a kid wanted to know how something worked, he could lean over it and figure it out. Watching that land is half the reason to go.

Griffin Region College & Career Academy and the Griffin-Spalding County School System put Spalding Works together, and they ran it well. Students carried workbooks between stations and collected a stamp at each one, which gave the morning a little shape beyond drifting down a hallway. For us the value was simple: a kid standing next to a machine starts asking how it works, what happens when it stops, and who keeps it running.

We showed up because this is where the people who run these machines come from. Every plant and warehouse around here is going to need people who can build, troubleshoot, program, maintain and improve the systems, and you cannot hire somebody who does not exist yet. The schools teach the code and the hardware well. What a classroom cannot teach is what the machine is for once it is on a floor, where the material comes in, what to do when the job does not match the drawing. That is a gap an employer can close in an afternoon, and it is a short drive from the office.

That is the part of this we actually believe in. A company is not its name on a sponsorship banner. It is whether the schools, the employers and a few hundred kids end up in the same hallway on a Thursday morning.

Plenty of other employers were in that room competing for the same future hires, and all of them did the same thing: stood by their equipment while teenagers made up their own minds. That part matters. The kids had things to compare instead of one company telling them what to think.

The usual story about automation is that it takes jobs. What we watched in that hallway was the other side: a trade being handed to kids young enough to still be deciding what they want to do. The one leaning in at the table could be on a floor a few years from now, the only person who knows how to get a stalled machine moving again.

That pipeline does not appear the day a robot arrives. It starts with exposure, then practice, then somebody who can help turn curiosity into a skill. One morning will not fix a workforce gap. It is a start, and it costs an employer a few hours and a couple of people willing to stand in a hallway and answer the same question forty times. That is a low bar, and most companies can clear it.

The best part happened after the morning was over. The kids got excited about learning to program the robot, so Dan and I came back the next day with two seniors and taught them to run it ourselves. Then those two turned around and taught the other students how to use it. That is exactly how this is supposed to work. Nobody stood in front of a whiteboard. The kids who got their hands on it passed it to the next ones the same way.

We did not hand them a curriculum. We handed them the controls and got out of the way, and by the end of the day the students were the ones doing the teaching. That took one extra day and two willing kids. It is the cheapest workforce development program we have ever been part of.

We are doing it again in November at Tech Trek with Southern Crescent Technical College, the Henry County Development Authority and Henry County Schools, and we are working with Pike County this month as well. Another hallway, another few hundred students next to real machines. The industry has been building robots faster than it has been building the people who know how to run them. Getting kids in front of the equipment early is one of the few ways that changes.

Nobody remembers a banner. They remember the morning somebody handed them a machine and let them run it.