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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Manufacturing

They are talking about this topic: Needs & Challenges in Continuing Education

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
Employers are interested in more extensive partnering with MnSCU on incumbent training programs. They are in need of training and certificate programs that are customized, on-site, and flexible. Ideally, this type of training could be offered without interrupting the production process.

Employer Quote Region
"I had requested a phone conversation, and I had great involvement from our educational area of this region. And the call included other people from some of the associations. We were talking about looking for an online—or something out there—that is like a canned program where we can say, 'Customize me a package for taking a worker that I want to elevate to another skill set.' That's still lacking some traction, but that may be the way we solve some of those pieces.

I was discussing a press brake operator—we don't have a source—we can't find people coming in that have got that skill set. Our welding programs provide part of that, but—of course—the idea is, 'I'm going to earn $90 an hour as a welder, not $18 an hour as a fabricator in a precision production facility doing press brake operation.'

So, for that need, help me with having access to training packages—that are either done by industry or done by academia—that allow me to take a worker that is already part of our workforce and say, 'If you're interested in this, I will participate in the funding of it to get you trained. Here is the program.' We're too small to provide in-house training for that. And we're too small for a mentoring program because, unfortunately, that staff has been hired away by somebody that can pay more. So, we are a feeder program for a lot of the groups around the area, and we recognize that.

So, now we need to be able to quickly put in place process controls. We're training to get people up to the level that they can produce at the aerospace qualified production level that we attest to be at. And we're going to find that growing requirement when we gain the AAR group, when we get our expansion."		 Northeast
"To speak to the issue of specializing and customizing some of the training, I was part of the group that focused on [MnSCU colleges] re-do of their machine technology in advanced aviation. It was focused on the aviation industry in this region. It included more quality control, programming, and set-up of large production runs versus job shop. But that's available to anyone that has sufficient demand of numbers for the customized training—that they can put something together to focus on one company—to develop a program to serve the needs of your employees. So, if there are big enough numbers, they're certainly open to listening to and including your needs in their training programs. And, too, you could look at a customized training program specifically for your company or your industry, if they would be prepared when they completed the training." Northeast
"Well, there's a little bit on the funding side that—I know we've worked really closely with [MnSCU college] with some grants and things, and that's real positive. But I'll tell you, on the industry side, one of the first things that always gets cut is training. That's one of the bottom-line things. We have to really look at what's cost-effective and reasonable. So, there's got to be some other choices out there that are available for our folks." Northeast
"We're facing some of the same situations as we evolve with our mechanical skills. How do we take a guy who's been working for 25 years and teach him laser alignment, around his rotating shift schedule? We might have to have him work on a weekend or something crazy like that. I mean, we're not to the point of really getting into that, but certainly it's on everybody's mind as we start asking for these additional levels of training, or formal means of training for what used to be a hand-me-down type of approach. That's going to be a big issue. Because we might have 50 people and 12 of them might want or need additional training. But they're all working three or four different shift schedules, and we can't do without 12 of them at the same time, anyway.

So, maybe this guy could go on that Wednesday to learn that skill module, or whatever that is. We can even provide some of the facilities. We talked about using some of the pumps and equipment that our people work on in our shop. Just having some help with the instruction, and getting training as well as some kind of certificate or whatever it ends up being. It's certainly something that is going to be an issue for us in the near future."		 Northeast
"Going back to our incumbent worker training, if I could have the ear of MnSCU's system, I'd say that identifying a means to make accessible the skill training—that is specific as an online course or as an individualized training program—would be so beneficial to a great number of people. We have identified quality people that need new sets of skills.

And now we need that next level. We need to bring them up with one more piece of education that can help them become a more productive worker. And, unfortunately, we're among the many companies that are too small to do this ourselves—resources and finances being the big item. If I had a place to go where I could say, 'I have this person that needs this skill set taught.' If you can do that, I can provide the environment for that person to be applying those new skills. I can give them a paid work position.

As long as they participate in production in my facility, and earn me money, we can work something like that along. But what we can't do is wait for somebody to spend two years at a technical school to bring back those pieces. When you ask the question, 'What can MnSCU do?' The answer is, 'They can give a much more cafeteria-style training program that's available to the workforce for raising those specific skill sets.'

We need much more specialized training. This can be done with modules on a statewide level or a national level. How the student receives that—whether it's credentials or something else—is not my interest. My interest is making something happen in my facility and elevating my productivity. But education may have a different approach. So, everybody can win if we all get something out of what's going on. Our association has been discussing a means of—how do we fund this?

And our educational trust has a nice little package of pieces, so we could actually help fund some of that in a revolving loan. I trust that there's a hundred different means of finding financing to support that. MnSCU is all about financing. Where do we get the money from? If you can provide us a product, we can provide a funding source, I believe, within all the structures that are out there. We have the customer base, so now what we need is academia to step up and say, 'Here's what we can do. Here are the modules.'"		 Northeast