BCN October 26, 2026

Panelists (CONT’D FROM PAGE 24)

Ochi: I want to follow up on that on culture and the workforce challenge that the industry is facing. Chris, would you mind sharing how Welch is bringing in a new generation and looking at culture and education. Keslin: We have a program called Early Career Profes- sionals--internally we just call it ECP--and every semes- ter when there's a new class of college graduates we'll

of the standard work you bring to the floor. Can you talk about how that may be an extension of the safety and kind of behavioral changes to help mitigate risk? Pickering: I had a conversation in Canada a few years ago where we talked about AI security and how hard it is now to break into companies. So, if I wanted to break into one of your companies, what I would do is I would sprin- kle a dozen USB drives on the car park [parking lot]. Now just think about that for a moment. I'm going to get inside the company. Somebody's going to plug that USB drive in and as soon as they do, you're in! The moral of this story is you need to also have a great policy about not being broken into from the outside. You need to have a great policy about plugging drives into your network internally. Something to think about. Anderson: One of the things that really grabbed my at- tention was if we had a recordable incident in any one of our plants, everybody from a plant manager and above had to get on a call, walk through the entire process, un- derstand how it happened, and then go through how we're going to mitigate it. At first, I thought that was an incredi- ble amount of resources to pour into one meeting. For 30 minutes, we had to go through this. We had to understand it. We had to figure out how do we disseminate that out to the rest of our team. That really struck to me how import- ant safety was in our organization.

agree to hire somewhere between five and seven grads across all majors. For example, one of our ECPs got his degree in comput- er science but he started in our program with box basics, then he was out on the floor for at least three to six months doing the job rotating through running a flexo, doing hand assem-

Chris Keslin

bly, working with the schedulers and really understanding how the box plant works. The overall goal is to try to bring up that knowledge from the core. Of the last five classes we’ve run, we’ only lost two individuals, so for the most part, they're sticking with it, the program is working and I’m absolutely thrilled. Ochi: Billy, you shared some great advice about bring- ing young talent in that are coming out of high school and CONTINUED ON PAGE 28

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