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Contact Us Get Involved Activities Calendar Bylaws Press Center	Industry Prepares for Gap in Workforce September 17, 2006 - Source: Molly Hennessy-FiskeLos Angeles Times WASHINGTON – Daniel McGee’s parents were apprehensive when their son turned his back on the college degree they assumed he would earn. A bachelor’s degree was the key to success in the modern economy, and their son was on track to earn one, with athletic honors, a 3.0 grade-point average at his Minnesota high school and scholarships in hand. But as McGee saw it, his future lay in the old-world industry of metalworking. And to succeed, he would have to do something that would shock many parents: turn down the scholarships and study machine-tool technology at a two-year technical college. McGee, 21, realized what many American workers didn’t: Manufacturing, long known for plant closings and layoffs, is now clamoring for workers to fill high-paying, skilled jobs. While millions of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or automated out of existence during the last decade, many of the remaining jobs require higher skills and pay well – $50,000 to $80,000 a year for workers with the necessary math, computer and mechanical abilities. Some manufacturers are so desperate for workers who can program, run or repair the computers and robots that now dominate the factory floor that they offer recruitment bonuses, relocation packages and other incentives more common to white-collar jobs. In Ohio, American Micro Products Inc., an electrical parts maker, is offering $1,000 bonuses to workers who recruit technicians, and it is covering moving costs for new employees. In San Antonio, Toyota cannot find enough qualified applicants for skilled positions at its new plant, even after the state sponsored a training program. In Fontana, Calif., California Steel Industries Inc. found it so hard to fill five mechanical and technical positions, some paying $28 an hour, that managers started paying employees to train for the unfilled jobs. About 90 percent of manufacturers say they are having trouble filling skilled jobs such as machinists and technicians, according to a survey released in December by the National Association of Manufacturers, representing 12,000 manufacturers. Of those manufacturers, 83 percent said the shortage of skilled workers affected their ability to serve customers. The shortfall has caught the attention of President Bush, who last week visited a metal parts maker in Green Bay, Wis., and noted that the company was unable to fill its orders because it couldn’t find enough workers. One of the biggest barriers to hiring young workers such as McGee is manufacturing’s reputation as dirty, low-paid and monotonous work. But McGee said he likes mechanical work – he worked at a bicycle shop during high school and in his father’s garage workshop – and was bored by the thought of liberal arts classes without real-world applications. Now, after graduating from a private, Minneapolis-area high school, he is working as a paid apprentice at a local metal parts manufacturing business, which also helped pay for his two-year technical training program at a community college. “I find more value in on-the-job experience along with technical education experience” than in a four-year degree, McGee said. “I see a lot of people coming out of school with just the book knowledge and finding it hard to find a job.” At first, McGee’s decision was tough for his parents to accept. Although Mike McGee, 49, is academic dean at the community college his son attends, he still had visions of manufacturing work that involved “a blue-collar, tattoo on the arm, drink beer after the shift – not the kind of career for my son.” What changed his mind was seeing his son hired by E.J. Ajax & Sons Inc., which makes metal brackets, latches and parts for household appliances and industrial machinery. In addition to tuition and a $14-an-hour apprenticeship, the company is providing McGee with health insurance, a 401(k) and, when his training is complete, a salary of $58,240 a year. That’s more than his college-educated brother earns at an advertising job that took him two years to find. The average industrial technician earned $54,643 last year, according to California’s Employment Development Department. By comparison, median earnings for all full-time U.S. workers last year were less than $34,000. Yet surveys show American youth see manufacturing as a low-paying career track they would rather avoid. In addition to their image problem, manufacturers are having trouble finding skilled workers because older workers with the proper training are retiring in large numbers. Many assembly workers who were laid off are unwilling to return to manufacturing or unable to upgrade their math skills, said Mary Rose Hennessy, executive director of the Coalition for Manufacturers at Northern Illinois University. Some companies say they will pay to retrain workers, but that the community college programs they once relied on have been eliminated. Many of the 1,202 member colleges of the American Association of Community Colleges closed programs because of flagging student demand, said Norma Kent, vice president of communications. Now, businesses are clamoring for new, updated programs that require costly training equipment, she said. Manufacturing is vulnerable to economic downturns, and colleges are wary that they will invest in expensive programs only to see jobs dry up. When Toyota announced plans to open a new plant with 2,000 jobs in San Antonio, it received 100,000 applications from people eager to work. But for the 200 technician positions that required higher skills, the automaker had trouble finding applicants, said Daniel Sieger, spokesman for Toyota’s North American manufacturing headquarters. The state of Texas paid teacher Frank Quijano to train as many as 50 people at a time at a local community college for the skilled Toyota jobs, but only 20 signed up. When Quijano asked people at a job fair why they did not apply for the jobs, which pay between $40,000 and $50,000, “they would all say it’s low-paying, dangerous and dirty,” he said. Shortages are forcing many manufacturers to recruit across state lines. Dow Chemical Co. is recruiting in Texas, Louisiana and Michigan to fill technician jobs for its plant in Pittsburg, Calif. During the past five years, Daniel McGee’s employer, E.J. Ajax & Sons, has paid for training for all 50 of its workers, owner Erick Ajax said. But Ajax expects half the workforce to retire in the next 15 years and is having trouble finding replacements. That is why Ajax wants to hold on to McGee. Ajax recently offered the young apprentice an additional incentive: If McGee enrolls in the manufacturing technology program to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota, Ajax will pay his tuition. This time, McGee says, he plans to accept the scholarship and earn the four-year degree he initially spurned. “I plan on doing basically what my parents have done – have a house, cars, the American dream, I suppose,” he said the other day while taking a break from working on the plant computers. “I think it’s actually going to happen quicker the way I’m doing it than most of the people my age, because I have on-the-job experience. Most people my age have another year of school, and then they’re starting at the bottom.” Delta Unites with Process Tech Leaders July 2, 2005 - William Shoemaker - Source: Midland Daily News Delta College officially teamed up with over 40 corporations, schools, and government leaders in the Great Lakes region last week to form what they’ve called the Great Lakes Process Technology Alliance, as industry analysts have predicted massive shortfalls of qualified plant operators over the next five years. Formed to align the process technology programs at schools like Delta with the needs of industry, the GLPTA’s membership consists of regional corporate giants like the Dow Chemical Co., SC Johnson & Son, Inc., and BP America, Inc., as well as the schools that would train their employees, such as Delta, Ferris State University and Lansing Community College. Members hope the GLPTA will help resolve difficulties schools have had filling classrooms while supplying qualified workers to fill a predicted 40% shortage of qualified operators nationwide over the next five years as the process technology workforce continues to age. Delta College has also had difficulty filling its process technology classes since the program began in 1995. This year the school graduated fewer than 20 students from the two-year program, which is run out of a $1 million pilot lab. Delta’s problems reflect a similar region-wide shortage of process technicians that is growing, said Johnny Payne, BP operations technical training manager, who helped organize the alliance. "You combine the needs of BP, Dow, Marathon Ashland, SC Johnson and all those industries coming together, and the needs just increase in number," he said. To respond to those needs, the colleges and corporations at Friday’s daylong session developed a charter that included commitments to sharing equipment and facilities, collaborating on placing graduates, and working together to obtain grants and resources. The alliance’s goal is to make it easier for all the schools in the area to produce better-prepared students faster, a task that can be especially difficult given the high costs of process technology equipment, said Bruce Farris, Lansing Community College process technology coordinator. "If we can exchange ideas, it helps both of us," Farris said. "Development on our own would be much more difficult than with an alliance like this." The alliance also will allow process tech organizations to have a stronger presence on a national level, and help schools and businesses better understand how their needs differ from other regions, said Joan Sabourin, Delta chemistry professor and new interim executive co-director of the GLPTA.. The Great Lakes region differs from those other organizations in its focus on pharmaceuticals, paper and pulp, and chemicals from companies like Dow, Sabourin added. The alliance, she said, allows a chance to approach those regional needs as a region. Dave Herrala, culture change facilitator at the Dow Chemical Co. said that although the process technology sector in Midland will not see the same operator shortages as the rest of the industry, the company is interested in making their current workers better trained. "The key thing we want to do is make sure we have a place to articulate the needs of the workplace," he said, "–what the skill needs are – and that’s important to us." Industry Prepares for Gap in Workforce February 15, 2005 - Source: The Facts, Elliot Blackburn A process technician degree is practically a guaranteed job, according to graduate placement figures, and demand is expected to rise. More than 90 percent of the students who graduate the process technician program in local community colleges receive jobs, according to school officials. As the national average age of plant operators nears 50 and workers edge closer to retirement, students will find an even higher premium placed on their degree, company officials said. “It’s what we call the demographic time bomb, and it’s ticking,” said John Payne, BP operations technical training manager for the western hemisphere. Roughly 30 percent of the plant operators currently working for petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food preparation and other plant operations locally and nationally will retire by 2015, according to a fall survey by the American Petroleum Institute. The supply of new blood has kept up with demand so far, company officials said. But companies are looking to spark interest at a younger age, starting labs in high schools and creating scholarships at both colleges as industry braces for staff turnover. “You’re going to have better than half of your workforce, conservatively, that will be able to leave in the next eight years or so,” said Mike Gragg, site learning leader for Dow Texas Operations. “Just to hold steady where industry’s at, there’s going to be quite a bit of demand for people with the skill set of a process technology associate’s degree.” Operators perform all of the manual labor that is needed to bring raw material in one end of a plant and a finished product out the other, said Steve Erickson, executive director of the Gulf Coast Process Technology Alliance. The Alliance, a consortium of industry and educational groups that includes BASF, Dow Chemical, Alvin Community College and Brazosport College, refines and promotes the process technician curriculum. All industry officials praised the skills of their current operators. Process technicians are an evolution of that job, Erickson said. The training, created in the late 1980s in the Brazosport area, focuses not just on how to move product through a plant, but why it’s done, Erickson said. “Where the operator used to be primarily interested in what to do if a certain thing occurred, the process technician not only knows what to do, but why it did it,” Erickson said. “We found, of course, that if you know why you do something, that a lot of times you could anticipate what was going to cause a problem before it did.” In addition to aging workforce needs, process technicians keep the industry competitive, Gragg said. Companies save an estimated $25,000 by hiring graduates of community colleges, said Mark Demark, process technology department chair for Alvin Community College. Dow requires all of their new operators to have process technician associates degrees, Gragg said. “The bar is raised,” Gragg said. “For a competitive advantage, we have to have a higher skilled workforce.” All graduates of the Alvin Community College program received jobs in industry, Demark said. More than 90 percent of the graduates of the Brazosport College program, which will be expanded to include a four-year supervisory training program in the fall, were hired, department chair Gary Hicks said. Industry may have to hire from other smaller companies for a few years until the number of new graduates meets demand, but companies have known their work force would retire en masse for years, and planned accordingly, Demark said. As students become aware of the program, the gap will close, he said. “This problem has not been something that’s new,” Demark said. “There’s been a lot of forethought, and there’s been a lot of people paying attention to this type of thing.”

Industry Prepares for Gap in Workforce
September 17, 2006 - Source: Molly Hennessy-FiskeLos Angeles Times

WASHINGTON – Daniel McGee’s parents were apprehensive when their son turned his back on the college degree they assumed he would earn. A bachelor’s degree was the key to success in the modern economy, and their son was on track to earn one, with athletic honors, a 3.0 grade-point average at his Minnesota high school and scholarships in hand.

But as McGee saw it, his future lay in the old-world industry of metalworking. And to succeed, he would have to do something that would shock many parents: turn down the scholarships and study machine-tool technology at a two-year technical college.

McGee, 21, realized what many American workers didn’t: Manufacturing, long known for plant closings and layoffs, is now clamoring for workers to fill high-paying, skilled jobs.

While millions of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or automated out of existence during the last decade, many of the remaining jobs require higher skills and pay well – $50,000 to $80,000 a year for workers with the necessary math, computer and mechanical abilities.

Some manufacturers are so desperate for workers who can program, run or repair the computers and robots that now dominate the factory floor that they offer recruitment bonuses, relocation packages and other incentives more common to white-collar jobs.

In Ohio, American Micro Products Inc., an electrical parts maker, is offering $1,000 bonuses to workers who recruit technicians, and it is covering moving costs for new employees.

In San Antonio, Toyota cannot find enough qualified applicants for skilled positions at its new plant, even after the state sponsored a training program.

In Fontana, Calif., California Steel Industries Inc. found it so hard to fill five mechanical and technical positions, some paying $28 an hour, that managers started paying employees to train for the unfilled jobs.

About 90 percent of manufacturers say they are having trouble filling skilled jobs such as machinists and technicians, according to a survey released in December by the National Association of Manufacturers, representing 12,000 manufacturers.

Of those manufacturers, 83 percent said the shortage of skilled workers affected their ability to serve customers. The shortfall has caught the attention of President Bush, who last week visited a metal parts maker in Green Bay, Wis., and noted that the company was unable to fill its orders because it couldn’t find enough workers.

One of the biggest barriers to hiring young workers such as McGee is manufacturing’s reputation as dirty, low-paid and monotonous work. But McGee said he likes mechanical work – he worked at a bicycle shop during high school and in his father’s garage workshop – and was bored by the thought of liberal arts classes without real-world applications.

Now, after graduating from a private, Minneapolis-area high school, he is working as a paid apprentice at a local metal parts manufacturing business, which also helped pay for his two-year technical training program at a community college.

“I find more value in on-the-job experience along with technical education experience” than in a four-year degree, McGee said. “I see a lot of people coming out of school with just the book knowledge and finding it hard to find a job.”

At first, McGee’s decision was tough for his parents to accept. Although Mike McGee, 49, is academic dean at the community college his son attends, he still had visions of manufacturing work that involved “a blue-collar, tattoo on the arm, drink beer after the shift – not the kind of career for my son.”

What changed his mind was seeing his son hired by E.J. Ajax & Sons Inc., which makes metal brackets, latches and parts for household appliances and industrial machinery. In addition to tuition and a $14-an-hour apprenticeship, the company is providing McGee with health insurance, a 401(k) and, when his training is complete, a salary of $58,240 a year.

That’s more than his college-educated brother earns at an advertising job that took him two years to find.

The average industrial technician earned $54,643 last year, according to California’s Employment Development Department. By comparison, median earnings for all full-time U.S. workers last year were less than $34,000. Yet surveys show American youth see manufacturing as a low-paying career track they would rather avoid.

In addition to their image problem, manufacturers are having trouble finding skilled workers because older workers with the proper training are retiring in large numbers. Many assembly workers who were laid off are unwilling to return to manufacturing or unable to upgrade their math skills, said Mary Rose Hennessy, executive director of the Coalition for Manufacturers at Northern Illinois University.

Some companies say they will pay to retrain workers, but that the community college programs they once relied on have been eliminated. Many of the 1,202 member colleges of the American Association of Community Colleges closed programs because of flagging student demand, said Norma Kent, vice president of communications.

Now, businesses are clamoring for new, updated programs that require costly training equipment, she said. Manufacturing is vulnerable to economic downturns, and colleges are wary that they will invest in expensive programs only to see jobs dry up.

When Toyota announced plans to open a new plant with 2,000 jobs in San Antonio, it received 100,000 applications from people eager to work. But for the 200 technician positions that required higher skills, the automaker had trouble finding applicants, said Daniel Sieger, spokesman for Toyota’s North American manufacturing headquarters.

The state of Texas paid teacher Frank Quijano to train as many as 50 people at a time at a local community college for the skilled Toyota jobs, but only 20 signed up. When Quijano asked people at a job fair why they did not apply for the jobs, which pay between $40,000 and $50,000, “they would all say it’s low-paying, dangerous and dirty,” he said.

Shortages are forcing many manufacturers to recruit across state lines. Dow Chemical Co. is recruiting in Texas, Louisiana and Michigan to fill technician jobs for its plant in Pittsburg, Calif.

During the past five years, Daniel McGee’s employer, E.J. Ajax & Sons, has paid for training for all 50 of its workers, owner Erick Ajax said.

But Ajax expects half the workforce to retire in the next 15 years and is having trouble finding replacements.

That is why Ajax wants to hold on to McGee. Ajax recently offered the young apprentice an additional incentive: If McGee enrolls in the manufacturing technology program to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota, Ajax will pay his tuition.

This time, McGee says, he plans to accept the scholarship and earn the four-year degree he initially spurned.

“I plan on doing basically what my parents have done – have a house, cars, the American dream, I suppose,” he said the other day while taking a break from working on the plant computers.

“I think it’s actually going to happen quicker the way I’m doing it than most of the people my age, because I have on-the-job experience. Most people my age have another year of school, and then they’re starting at the bottom.”

Delta Unites with Process Tech Leaders
July 2, 2005 - William Shoemaker - Source: Midland Daily News

Delta College officially teamed up with over 40 corporations, schools, and government leaders in the Great Lakes region last week to form what they’ve called the Great Lakes Process Technology Alliance, as industry analysts have predicted massive shortfalls of qualified plant operators over the next five years.
    Formed to align the process technology programs at schools like Delta with the needs of industry, the GLPTA’s membership consists of regional corporate giants like the Dow Chemical Co., SC Johnson & Son, Inc., and BP America, Inc., as well as the schools that would train their employees, such as Delta, Ferris State University and Lansing Community College.
    Members hope the GLPTA will help resolve difficulties schools have had filling classrooms while supplying qualified workers to fill a predicted 40% shortage of qualified operators nationwide over the next five years as the process technology workforce continues to age.
    Delta College has also had difficulty filling its process technology classes since the program began in 1995. This year the school graduated fewer than 20 students from the two-year program, which is run out of a $1 million pilot lab.
    Delta’s problems reflect a similar region-wide shortage of process technicians that is growing, said Johnny Payne, BP operations technical training manager, who helped organize the alliance.
    "You combine the needs of BP, Dow, Marathon Ashland, SC Johnson and all those industries coming together, and the needs just increase in number," he said.
    To respond to those needs, the colleges and corporations at Friday’s daylong session developed a charter that included commitments to sharing equipment and facilities, collaborating on placing graduates, and working together to obtain grants and resources.
    The alliance’s goal is to make it easier for all the schools in the area to produce better-prepared students faster, a task that can be especially difficult given the high costs of process technology equipment, said Bruce Farris, Lansing Community College process technology coordinator.
    "If we can exchange ideas, it helps both of us," Farris said. "Development on our own would be much more difficult than with an alliance like this."
    The alliance also will allow process tech organizations to have a stronger presence on a national level, and help schools and businesses better understand how their needs differ from other regions, said Joan Sabourin, Delta chemistry professor and new interim executive co-director of the GLPTA.. The Great Lakes region differs from those other organizations in its focus on pharmaceuticals, paper and pulp, and chemicals from companies like Dow, Sabourin added.
    The alliance, she said, allows a chance to approach those regional needs as a region.
    Dave Herrala, culture change facilitator at the Dow Chemical Co. said that although the process technology sector in Midland will not see the same operator shortages as the rest of the industry, the company is interested in making their current workers better trained.
    "The key thing we want to do is make sure we have a place to articulate the needs of the workplace," he said, "–what the skill needs are – and that’s important to us."

Industry Prepares for Gap in Workforce
February 15, 2005 - Source: The Facts, Elliot Blackburn

A process technician degree is practically a guaranteed job, according to graduate placement figures, and demand is expected to rise.

More than 90 percent of the students who graduate the process technician program in local community colleges receive jobs, according to school officials. As the national average age of plant operators nears 50 and workers edge closer to retirement, students will find an even higher premium placed on their degree, company officials said.

“It’s what we call the demographic time bomb, and it’s ticking,” said John Payne, BP operations technical training manager for the western hemisphere.

Roughly 30 percent of the plant operators currently working for petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food preparation and other plant operations locally and nationally will retire by 2015, according to a fall survey by the American Petroleum Institute.

The supply of new blood has kept up with demand so far, company officials said. But companies are looking to spark interest at a younger age, starting labs in high schools and creating scholarships at both colleges as industry braces for staff turnover.

“You’re going to have better than half of your workforce, conservatively, that will be able to leave in the next eight years or so,” said Mike Gragg, site learning leader for Dow Texas Operations. “Just to hold steady where industry’s at, there’s going to be quite a bit of demand for people with the skill set of a process technology associate’s degree.”

Operators perform all of the manual labor that is needed to bring raw material in one end of a plant and a finished product out the other, said Steve Erickson, executive director of the Gulf Coast Process Technology Alliance. The Alliance, a consortium of industry and educational groups that includes BASF, Dow Chemical, Alvin Community College and Brazosport College, refines and promotes the process technician curriculum.

All industry officials praised the skills of their current operators. Process technicians are an evolution of that job, Erickson said. The training, created in the late 1980s in the Brazosport area, focuses not just on how to move product through a plant, but why it’s done, Erickson said.

“Where the operator used to be primarily interested in what to do if a certain thing occurred, the process technician not only knows what to do, but why it did it,” Erickson said. “We found, of course, that if you know why you do something, that a lot of times you could anticipate what was going to cause a problem before it did.”

In addition to aging workforce needs, process technicians keep the industry competitive, Gragg said. Companies save an estimated $25,000 by hiring graduates of community colleges, said Mark Demark, process technology department chair for Alvin Community College.

Dow requires all of their new operators to have process technician associates degrees, Gragg said.

“The bar is raised,” Gragg said. “For a competitive advantage, we have to have a higher skilled workforce.”

All graduates of the Alvin Community College program received jobs in industry, Demark said. More than 90 percent of the graduates of the Brazosport College program, which will be expanded to include a four-year supervisory training program in the fall, were hired, department chair Gary Hicks said.

Industry may have to hire from other smaller companies for a few years until the number of new graduates meets demand, but companies have known their work force would retire en masse for years, and planned accordingly, Demark said. As students become aware of the program, the gap will close, he said.

“This problem has not been something that’s new,” Demark said. “There’s been a lot of forethought, and there’s been a lot of people paying attention to this type of thing.”