All in Soft Skills

Explore and Learn About a Machining Career Path

Explore and Learn About a Machining Career Path

Matthew Schowalter, CMfgT
CNC Machining, CNC Programming, Machining, Machinist, Manufacturing, Soft Skills

Do You Have the Important Qualities for a Career in Machining?

  • Do you have a mechanical skillset?

  • Are you a technical person?

  • Do you excel at math?

If so, consider a career as a Machinist or Tool and Die Maker

What Skills Should a Machinist Have?

  • Mathematical Skills - Ability to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and compute basic trigonometry functions while choosing the right methods to solve the problem

  • Reasoning Ability - Ability to use common sense understanding and solve problems

  • Oral Comprehension - Ability to listen and understand information spoken

  • Computer Literacy - Ability to use a computer and work with Microsoft Office programs

  • Mechanical / Technical Skills - Must operate lathes, mills, grinders and other computer controlled machines

Machinists make components and parts on computer controlled manufacturing equipment such as a CNC lathe or a CNC mill.

Tool and die makers make tool, die and mold components and other industrial tools on manual and CNC equipment. They also fit the components together and align and assemble the industrial tools.

Introduction To Soft Skills

Bethmarie Leannah Simons
Soft Skills

Manufacturing, a place where metal and fluid work together in a delicately engineered dance to change inputs into a newly combined output. There is music in the moving parts, harmony in the ingenuity of human creativity. The machining of parts is a symphony drawn from human imagination which begins in a concept and completes as a usable tool for ever more creative machine design. This world, in the factory, is a place of hot and cold, a place of tension and release, a place of raw and refined. However, there is more to this secret world than meets the non-discerning eye.