Much is made of the difficulty virtually all businesses are having in
finding skilled workers. But for Paul Williams, the point was driven
home directly during a visit to a local manufacturer.
Williams, the school-to-career coordinator at Hanley Career and
Technical School in Providence, said he remembers seeing the company’s
goals for the year scrawled on a blackboard. One of them was ‘hire a
skilled machinist.’ When it takes all year to find one good person,
Williams said, it shows that opportunities for students who want to get
into manufacturing are abundant.
“It’s amazing the amount of opportunities out there for kids,”
Williams said.
But the problem, traditionally, has been convincing them of that –
and exposing them to the technology and training they need for today’s
high tech manufacturing jobs.
But now, the industry is working to change that. The Rhode Island
Manufacturers’ Partnership, which offers low-cost workforce development
courses to manufacturers, is looking to form partnerships with the
various technical high schools across the state, in an effort to boost
students’ preparedness for the manufacturing work world.
Already, the Partnership – a merger of two workforce development
programs that are supported by the state Human Resource Investment
Council – has worked with the William M. Davies Jr. Career and Technical
High School in Lincoln, in which the Partnership and representatives
from a number of Rhode Island manufacturers are working to redesign the
school’s manufacturing curriculum. Lisa V. Medeiros, program
coordinator for the Partnership, said the goal is to form similar
working agreements with other high schools around the state. There is
also an effort under way to get more companies to set up workspaces in
high school buildings, giving the company a training area and the school
access to the latest equipment.
The Manufacturers’ Partnership, which offers classes such as
statistical process control and team-based problem solving, will also be
encouraging instructors at various schools to take part in the
government-sponsored classes, Medeiros added.
The effort by the Manufacturing Partnership to help schools work with
more up-to-date equipment and give students access to the latest
industry techniques is part of an overall trend in education toward more
practical, career-based learning, Williams said.
“You can get an education in the world of work a lot better and a
lot faster than we’re able to provide in the traditional setting,”
Williams said. “I think we’ve got to be able to change the experiences
that kids are getting from the theoretical to the real.”
One of the problems the manufacturing industry is facing now,
Medeiros said, is that the industry is still perceived by many the way
it was during the industrial revolution. That image, she said, has to
change, and the industry has to do a better job of alerting young people
to the high-paying technical opportunities in the field.
Davies, for example, is dealing with this problem by taking every
opportunity to expose students to manufacturing as it is today, said
Stephanie Sullivan, coordinator of the business partnership program at
the school. And that includes teaching parents about the new
opportunities by inviting them on company tours when the school provides
them.
“We’re trying to encourage kids to go into manufacturing. It’s the
future of our state,” Sullivan said. “There are a tremendous amount of
well-paying jobs in the (manufacturing) industry; they’ve (students) got
to see that it’s a whole different ball game.”
What is encouraging to educators, noted Hanley Principal Bernard
Lough, is that the most popular classes seem to be the technical ones,
those heavy in computer work.
“The most in-demand (classes) would be computer science, printing and
graphic arts – anything where students see a good number of computers in
a classroom they want to be in that class,” Lough said. “I can’t keep
those classrooms open long enough.”
That should also be encouraging to manufacturers struggling to find
the good workers. But training is something more and more companies are
starting to take advantage of for their own workers, noted Steve
Kitchin, director of the Center for Technology and Industry at New
England Institute of Technology, which offers some of the training
programs for manufacturers through the Manufacturing Partnership.
He noted that classes range from computer assisted design to basic
subjects like blueprint reading, and basic math and geometry.
“I think what manufacturers have come to realize is that knowledge
power of workers translates into profit power,” Kitchin said.
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