Are Employers Ready for the Next Generation of Skilled Workers?
With Jon Ward · CEO, Ward Vessel and Exchanger
Hosted by Andrew Brown · September 29, 2026
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 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.
Key Takeaways.
01
New hires aren't going to be productive in the first 90 days, and treating that as a reality to plan around instead of a problem to rush through is what separates companies that retain people from ones that don't.
02
The best technical performer on a team is often the worst fit for mentoring someone new, patience and a genuine desire to take on someone else's problems matter more than raw skill.
03
A state-funded apprenticeship program can shift a meaningful chunk of a new hire's salary during training, but it only works with a real system behind it, not just goodwill and good intentions.
04
Shops competing for welders against data center construction jobs can win on stability (no travel, no relocation, steady hours) even when they can't win on raw pay.
Meet Jon Ward.
Jon Ward is President and CEO of Ward Vessel and Exchanger, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based manufacturer of ASME Code pressure vessels and heat exchangers with a second facility in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1982 as a family business, the company builds equipment used across consumer products, industrial manufacturing, and pharmaceutical production.
Jon is a 1994 UNC Charlotte engineering graduate, was appointed to the UNC Charlotte Board of Trustees in 2026, and was named among the Charlotte Business Journal's Most Admired CEOs the same year. Jon has spent the last several years rebuilding Ward's onboarding, mentorship, and apprenticeship systems around a "people first" ethos built on three values: passionate, consistent, and selfless.
He runs the company on EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) and hosts his own podcast, Forged in Focus, where he talks with manufacturing leaders about the future of the industry.
