Building the Pipeline

Author:  Kumar Balan | Blast Cleaning and Shot Peening Specialist
Source:  The Shot Peener magazine, Vol 40, Issue 4, Fall 2026
Doc ID:  2026060
Year of Publication:  2026
Abstract:  
ANJALI’S SUMMER There is a particular kind of silence that follows when you tell a sixteen-year-old you are available every evening to discuss shot peening intensity and coverage. It is not the comfortable silence of contemplation. In my situation, it lasted about as long as the durability of a poorly heat-treated cast shot — brief and ending in total breakdown. So, imagine my surprise when that very sixteen-year-old, my daughter Anjali, approached me this past summer asking, entirely unprompted, for a proper lesson on saturation curves. I have spent thirty-six years failing to make this subject sound thrilling at dinner parties. It took one summer job opportunity to succeed where I had not. The job in question was an internship at Vibra Finish LTD., the Mississauga, Ontario job shop whose vibratory peening work I wrote about in these pages back in 2019. She spent her summer around the same oscillating tubs, Almen strips, and saturation curves I described in that article, except this time she was the one asking the questions instead of me. I did not engineer this. Brian and Zach McGillivray are good friends, industry colleagues and users of Ervin shot for their cleaning and peening operations. When my daughter expressed interest in engineering education, I took her on an exploratory visit to Vibra Finish LTD. where Zach McGillivray was kind enough to offer her a summer position to help her determine the fit for her future. Curious rather than committed, and somewhere in those weeks of watching parts come out smoother and more fatigue-resistant than they went in, something clicked. A couple of weeks into her internship, she was asking me to walk her through the fundamentals properly, and not long after that, she sat for the Level 1 and Level 2 shot peening certification exams. She passed both, which is more than I can say for how she did the first time I asked her to load the dishwasher correctly. I am telling you this not because I think every reader needs to hear about my daughter, but because her summer accidentally traced out, in miniature, the exact path our industry needs to attract new recruits. Real exposure, followed by structured training, followed by a credential that means something beyond the walls of one shop. I want to spend this column arguing that we should be building that path on purpose, for a lot more people than just the ones lucky enough to know someone in the business.