America needs to dramatically increase jobs for equipment manufacturers so they can prosper and grow right here in the U.S. When manufacturers succeed – America wins.
I Make America only needs 514 more supporters to reach 20,000.  If you want to help out you can visit their website their website – HERE .  Just add your name to the growing list of supporters. Read More...

New York, NY – PRESS RELEASE -  February 22, 2012

My Dirty Jobs, the newest entrant in the household cleaning market, is launching a broad line of heavy-duty cleaning products formulated to handle your dirtiest jobs. The line is inspired by the Emmy®-nominated Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs, part of Discovery Communications, the world’s number one nonfiction media company. Host Mike Rowe travels the country showcasing hard working men and women who have some of the country’s messiest occupations. Read More...

from mikeroweWORKS HQ:

Mike Rowe tests his knowledge on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to raise money for the mikeroweWORKS Foundation benefitting recipients like Andrew Reisinger, one of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation 2011 tool scholarship recipients. Andrew, along with his parents joined Mike at the taping of Millionaire.

Mike and Meredith hit it off well (and she even sent him a very nice note for doing the show).  Watch the fun banter between them and find out how Mike did.  The episodes air on
February 27th and 28th, 2012. Check your local listings for times and channels – HERE .

Congratulations Mike (and Andrew)!

Chattahoochee Technical College welcomed high school counselors, business leaders and community members to the third stop on the Go Build Georgia regional tour Monday evening.

The tour, which kicked off Feb. 7, was designed to inform educators and business about the skills gap that has created a critical shortage of qualified candidates for the skilled trades. From welders to truck drivers and electricians to pipefitters, there are currently fewer people qualified to fill those positions than there are people retiring from them. Read More...

Backstage at SolidWorks World, Mike Rowe talks about his life doing ‘Dirty Jobs’ and some interesting experiences stemming from his travels. Read More...

Mike Rowe of TV’s Dirty Jobs was a surprise guest speaker at the opening day of SolidWorks World 2012. Hidden inside his folksy presentation were lessons any designer or engineer can appreciate.

Graphic Speak
By Randall

There is a tradition of having surprise guest speakers show up at SolidWorks World. Movie stars like Leonard Nimoy and Kevin Bacon, and TV personalities like Mythbusters’ Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman have wandered on-stage to an unsuspecting but appreciative SolidWorks World audience. Today, on Day One of SolidWorks World 2012 it was Mike Rowe, host of the popular Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs.

Rowe has become more than a popular TV personality; he uses his celebrity status to promote the nobility of work and has become a crusader for ending the widening skills gap in the US, where more and more skilled labor jobs go unfilled in an era of high unemployment. His website mikeroweworks.com has information on his foundation and his off-camera work.

He shared his passions with the more than 5,000 attendees at SolidWorks World and later in a press conference. He complimented the engineers gathered, whom he referred to as men and women who stand in the gap “like a muddy boots architect,” people who are comfortable behind the computer in white collar work and equally at home in the shop getting hands-on to help create new products.

It may not have been his intention, but woven inside his remarks were lessons engineers and designers would be well served to follow:

Innovation and imitation are equally valid paths to a solution. Rowe talked about a Nevada pig farmer who figured out how to process the tons of leftover food he picked up daily from Las Vegas casinos. Without formal engineering training he designed and built a machine to cook and prepare this food as pig feed. What he created was more about imitation of various ideas and schemes and ideas he had seen elsewhere, but for this farmer, it was an innovation that solved a tough problem. Rowe argued there is not enough emphasis on imitation as a valid methodology for problem solving in our society.

You can never have too much data. Every person on the six-man Dirty Jobs production crew shares cameraman duties, including Rowe. There are no second takes, no re-dos when they cover a dirty job, because as Rowe said “you never know when a key moment will happen.” Most TV production teams try to shoot as little as possible, Rowe said, but his crew can’t shoot enough.

Read the complete article – HERE

SolidWorks World 2012 – Day 1 General Session

SolidWorks Blog

Read about the general sessions of SolidWORKS World 2012. The first guest of the day was Mike Rowe from Discovery’s Dirty Jobs. Mike talked about the growing skills gap in the US, and focused heavily on the need for education in trades.

Watch Mike’s backstage interview at SolidWorks World – HERE