For shipbuilders, finding talent for open jobs isn't easy

http://hamptonroads.com/2014/08/shipbuilders-finding-talent-open-jobs-isnt-easy

For shipbuilders, finding talent for open jobs isn't easy
By Robert McCabe
The Virginian-Pilot
© August 10, 2014

NORFOLK

Carole Bowen is a 67-year-old great-grandmother – and a first-rate welder with nearly 40 years of experience.

All but a few of those years have been spent at the Norfolk shipyard now owned by BAE Systems, whose sprawling complex just south of the Berkley Bridge forms part of the city’s waterfront, a vista of drydocked warships and towering cranes.

~snip~

She’s stuck with it, though, taking pride in the fact that she’s good at it – good enough to have been sent by her employer to San Francisco, San Diego and Honolulu over the course of her career to ply her craft.

Yet within the next year or so, Bowen plans to retire, part of a seismic shift in the region’s shipbuilding and ship-repair industry that, by the end of the decade, will have subtracted 18,000 skilled workers, an upheaval that local shipyard managers have mobilized to address.