Careers that Work
Assembly Worker
Season 5 Episode 3 | 4m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
Meet assembly worker Brandon Phillips and discover a hands-on career building industrial equipment.
Meet Brandon Phillips, an assembly worker at Young Industries in Muncy. From reading blueprints to building custom industrial equipment, Brandon puts his mechanical thinking, attention to detail and hands-on skills to work—and shows how an interest in taking things apart and understanding how they work can become a career.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Careers that Work is a local public television program presented by WVIA
Careers that Work
Assembly Worker
Season 5 Episode 3 | 4m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
Meet Brandon Phillips, an assembly worker at Young Industries in Muncy. From reading blueprints to building custom industrial equipment, Brandon puts his mechanical thinking, attention to detail and hands-on skills to work—and shows how an interest in taking things apart and understanding how they work can become a career.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipA typical rotary valve could take you between eight and sometimes it takes more than eight hours.
It takes maybe a couple days depending on the features.
We do rotary valves that are the size of a small Volkswagen all the way to ones that you can hold in your hand basically.
This is one of the biggest valves we work on.
It's used in the production of ethanol.
My name is Brandon Phillips.
I work at Young Industries as an assembler in Muncie, Pennsylvania.
On a typical day, I assemble equipment that's used in the bulk material handling industry.
A lot of it has to do with manufacturing and the components that manufacturers use, the different ingredients and things.
A lot of our equipment moves the ingredients, transports it.
There's mixers that mix it.
There's sifters that will sift bigger particles out.
I assemble those throughout my job here.
Like this is, right here's a ribbon mixer for inside one of the mixers.
So this is actually the piece that goes inside and mixes the material up.
When I was a kid, I used to take things apart and put them back together and I was really interested in the way things worked.
So throughout my life, I've worked in a couple different fields.
I've welded, I've done a couple other things and I had the opportunity to work here.
I was always a handling type of person.
I was always building like science kits and as a kid, model kits, all kinds of stuff.
When I was younger, I watched Mythbusters, which they built a lot of things.
And later on in life, I started following like Adam Savage, who has a huge workshop and builds all kinds of stuff, machine stuff, puts things together and it just took my interest.
Typically, when we come into work, we look over the work order and just kind of re-familiarize ourselves with the work order so we don't miss anything when we're assembling stuff.
If it's started on a day and finished on a day, but if not, I go to my supervisor and I see what equipment we have to build next and assemble.
We do make custom equipment.
So there's a lot of features that are different from customer to customer.
You need to make sure all your parts are in.
Sometimes there's parts that are on backwater that we're waiting on.
And you have to just be careful because if you miss something small, it can mean a big problem later on in the assembly process.
Some personality interests that would make you a good fit for this work is if you're a very hands-on person, if you're interested in the way things work or tearing things down.
Like I said, when I was a child, I tore a lot of things down to see how they worked.
If you are proud of what you do and doing it the correct way to make sure the customers that we provide products with get a good product at the end of the day, that's exactly what they want.
As far as an educational standpoint for this job, you don't exactly need to go to college.
You can definitely build up skills.
There's things you can do in high school as far as shop classes and machining and CAD drawing, things like that, that will help you understand this job better.
I did a lot of CAD classes in school, so it's easy for me to read the blueprints.
If you're able to understand work orders, this would be a job that would be good for you.
This career has allowed me to be very flexible.
I come in at 6 o'clock and I work till 2.30, so I have the rest of the day to enjoy.
I'm an avid fisherman.
I also do leatherworking and sewing.
This career has given me the ability to afford those hobbies.
Besides fishing, this job allowed me to buy a new Subaru Impreza, a reliable night's vehicle.
What I take the most pride in while I do my job is that we work for some customers that provide medicine, provide other things that are pretty essential to day-to - day life, and knowing that I was able to be part of that and be able to be part of the building machines that give them the ability to do what they do is what gives me the pride in this job.


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