The Shortage Everyone Talks About Is the Wrong One
Georgia, USA, 16th October 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Every few months another report says manufacturing cannot find enough skilled workers. Edmund Dorsz has heard that line for most of his career, and he thinks it skips the actual problem.
“Companies will post for a CNC programmer with five years of experience,” he says, “but they won’t say who is supposed to teach that person the parts of the job that never show up in a manual.”
Dorsz has worked across CAD and CAM systems including Siemens NX, SolidWorks, Mastercam, and CATIA V5. He says the software is rarely the hard part. The hard part is judgment, the kind that comes from someone standing next to a new hire at a machine and explaining why a toolpath that looks fine on screen will chatter on the actual part.
What Gets Lost When Nobody Is Assigned to Teach
Dorsz says the mentorship that used to happen informally, a senior programmer walking a newer one through a setup, has gotten thinner as shops run leaner and schedules get tighter.
“Nobody decided to stop training people,” he says. “It just stopped being anyone’s job in particular, so it happens less.”
He points to a gap he sees often: new programmers who are strong in the software but have never had to explain a toolpath choice to someone running the machine. “You can model a part perfectly and still hand the floor something that’s a headache to cut,” he says. “That’s not a software problem. That’s an experience problem.”
Dorsz owned and ran Accelerated Precision Tooling Company in California before moving into his current role, so he has seen the gap from both sides, as an employer trying to staff a shop and as a programmer trying to get a part right the first time.
Why He Still Makes Time for It
Dorsz says he takes training requests from coworkers seriously, even when it slows down his own week. “If someone asks me to walk through why I set a part up a certain way, I’ll stop and do it,” he says. “It costs me twenty minutes. It can save them a scrapped part later.”
He is careful to draw a line between correcting someone’s work and dismissing it. “I had people do that to me early on, and it didn’t make me better, it just made me quiet,” he says. “I’d rather someone ask a question twice than guess once and be wrong.”
He also pushes back on the idea that patience is a soft skill that does not belong on a shop floor. “Precision work is unforgiving,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean the people doing it have to be. You can hold a tight tolerance and still be easy to work with.”
What He Tells Programmers Starting Out
Dorsz says the advice he gives newer programmers is less about which CAD/CAM system to learn and more about staying curious once they know one. “Get good at your first system, but don’t stop there,” he says. “The programmer who only knows one way to solve a problem runs out of options fast.”
He also tells them not to treat the screen as the whole job. “The part doesn’t live in the software,” he says. “It lives on the machine. Go stand next to it when you can.”
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About Edmund Dorsz
Edmund Dorsz is a CNC programmer and manufacturing engineer based in Newnan, Georgia. He has worked with Siemens NX, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Mastercam, and CATIA V5, and previously owned Accelerated Precision Tooling Company in California. He has been with Clayton International Inc. since January 2025.
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