Are Employers Ready for the Next Generation of Skilled Workers?

Jon Ward, CEO of Ward Vessel and Exchanger, on why welders quit in the first 90 days, how a "people first" culture actually gets built, and why your best welder is rarely your best mentor.

Jon asks a question most shop owners avoid: if a million young people raised their hands tomorrow and said they wanted to work in the skilled trades, would employers actually be ready for them? His answer is blunt. A lot of companies say they'd hire 20 or 40 people tomorrow if they could find them, but most have no system to actually bring that many people on without losing them in the first three months. Ward Vessel and Exchanger builds pressure vessels and heat exchangers that end up in everything from Gorilla Glue to GLP-1 drug manufacturing, and Jon's spent years rebuilding how his company onboards, mentors, and retains welders in two very different labor markets, Charlotte and Houston.

Jon Ward has run Ward Vessel and Exchanger, a family manufacturing business founded in 1982, since taking over leadership of the company. He's built a formal apprenticeship program with NC Works, runs the business on EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System), and was named to the UNC Charlotte Board of Trustees in 2026. He also hosts his own podcast, Forged in Focus.

This episode is for anyone building or fixing an onboarding process, any shop owner losing skilled people to bigger paychecks at data center jobs, and anyone who's ever wondered whether their most talented person should actually be the one training the new hires. Jon walks through his three core values, what a real apprenticeship partnership with a workforce agency looks like, and the mastery chart his team is rolling out to make skill progression visible to every welder on the floor.

IN THIS EPISODE

(00:00) – Why the First 90 Days Make or Break a New Hire: Jon explains why the old "pair them with a lead guy and let them figure it out" model fails, and what changes when leadership actually gets involved early.

(03:00) – The Three Core Values Behind a People-First Culture: Passionate, consistent, and selfless, Jon breaks down how Ward hires to these values, fires to them, and built a "people first" ethos around a line he heard on a stage years ago: culture over customers.

(05:00) – Building an Apprenticeship Program With NC Works: How a one-year, state-funded apprenticeship partnership in Mecklenburg County works in practice, and what Jon learned running it with his first apprentice.

(10:00) – What Ward Vessel and Exchang