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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Manufacturing

They are talking about this topic: Educational Partnerships

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
Employers comment on various other existing and potential partnerships between education and the industry.

Employer Quote Region
"Non-Profit Participant: We provide a lot of those basic skills that people are talking about. In order to move into the technical training programs, clients in our programs need to complete an attitude course, a job-seeking course, and a course on how to understand the business world. They're completing about 90 hours of work. They have to show up every single day. You can't miss a day. And if they're not making the grade, they don't get into the customized and tuition-supported programs that we're providing in partnership with the college. The problem with that is that MnSCU doesn't pay for those services. They don't include that as an eligible expense in job skills partnership grants or in other kinds of training programs. So, as a non-profit, we're leveraging 25 different funding sources, cobbling together the resources to provide the skill sets that industry says it needs. When the government or the school system contracts to provide those skills, it doesn't cover the soft skills piece that we're doing. Somehow, it's seen as not quite as important as the skills directly related to getting the welding certificate. The attitude is, 'We'll pay for that piece, but we won't pay for the screening and the grooming of the people.'

Back in 2008, most of our clients were unemployed, low-income, under-educated, under-prepared, hard-to-serve individuals who weren't making it into the funded programs because they had too many barriers. That was our sort of niche. But, since the recession, we're seeing people who weren't the cream of the crop at the job they did have, and they lost their job. They were the folks who were let go. So, now, they're having to re-tool. And not only are they needing those skills, they're needing to figure out that if they had showed up on time every day and if they had been an exceptional employee, then maybe they would wouldn't have lost their job."		 Northeast
"We now go to southern Minnesota to find our mechanical drafting programs, so we can hire right out of college or two-year programs. A CNC program is no longer available anywhere near us. It's in those areas that we're reaching out to try to partner with both businesses and educators to see if we can't get some of those programs back up and running. What's happened is—when business will talk to education to try to put programs in and education has to see what is the demand—if their programs are showing enrollment declines, they're forced to try to kind of thin it out. They make as many of the programs feed in and take advantage as they can. So, they become more of an elective than the core. And, as they become electives, the need is less. So, they can't support a full program and, over time, they die out. It takes an investment by educators to put the programs in. We're willing, as business partners, to make those investments and we still can't get partners to do it with us. That's what's sad.

Question: Are there kids that want to take these classes? Is there a demand?

Employer: Yes."		 Northeast