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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:
Many employers are currently involved in internship programs through high schools or local colleges. Employers would like to see more candidates who have internship or workplace-based experience. Many employers are interested in partnering with MnSCU to create stronger partnerships in this area.

Employer Quote Region
"With some of the people that are new in the field, they're excited to learn. 'Show me this machine, that machine, whichever one you want me to learn.' Where some of my long-tenured employees are like, 'No, this is the machine I've been working on the last 20 years, so don't make me move.'

We actually need the practical experience. Whether that means more programs like the Right Skills Now program where it's mandatory—it's part of the program that they have so many hours working on it—I think that's helpful for the student. It means they have practical experience that they can bring to us. Normally, the only other way you would do that is if you go through an internship program, which we do with four-year students.

But this is really an internship, and we're hoping that if it works out, we will have full-time employees. But, again, we really do need a higher level of practical experience, but we're just not finding that. So, if we develop a program where some of those students come on-site so that we can give them some of that practical experience, then that might work, too."		 Southwest
"There are seven high school students, this spring semester, in different shops throughout Mankato. Five of the seven are going to stay on for summer employment. One of them is being scooped up for a night shift at forty some hours per week, and they're boosting him up to $16.85 an hour or something like that. So, it's five of the seven for the summer." Southwest
"This goes back for the last 20 years. I'm from [MnSCU college]; I graduated from that school. And my father actually was a machine tool instructor there for 32 years before he retired. But what worked really good for me—and not just for me but for our industry—was exactly what the other respondent suggested—we'd go out there every year and we'd try to take one or two people out of the class and then we would continue their education after they got to work for us. We'd get good candidates. So, I think the vocational part of it—the vocational education—was really important for a lot of our manufacturing companies. But we, as an industry, have to realize that that's not going to give us everything we need. And that's why we want to start working into an apprenticeship program. It would give students some structure while learning.

What we've always done—and what I've done for 20 years—is we take each young person and we pair them up with one of the more experienced machinists. And they shadow them. And if the young person was good and ambitious and wanted to learn, then they'd learn and it'd work out great. But it doesn't always work if the candidate just wants a job to make money. So, we're trying to get some more structure so we can kind of see where they go.

The vocational education really worked good, and we used to be able to get enough people into these programs. But Granite Falls had to close their machine tool program for lack of enrollment. They'd been struggling for years. As a system, they didn't really adapt too well because their feeder system used to be farm kids from southwestern Minnesota and South Dakota. As family farms shrank, so did their pool of candidates. And nothing was really ever done to overcome that. Yeah, you've got to change the model to adapt. Because the old model worked really well, but then—take out the pool of candidates—and it just failed. So, I think what we ought to do as industry is help these people fill up the pool of candidates again. Because, when we have candidates going into these programs, everything tends to roll along pretty good."		 Southwest
"Let me tell you what [out-of-state college] is already doing with a dairy production management course. The first year in that class—it's a three-credit class—they have to work for two hours a week on the floor in a dairy production facility milking cows. I mean, how degrading is that in some people's minds? 'Oh, I have to milk cows!' But, in my mind, that makes perfect sense because that's the technology that they're going to be running someday. So, you start on the floor and you work your way up. The second year that they're in that program, they become a supervisor of the people milking the cows. So, they learn leadership. There's so little leadership taught these days. I to try to glean as many leaders out of the military as I can because they've learned leadership just through osmosis. They've had to. But this program has a leadership piece built right into it. And the next year they come in and start doing CAD backs. So, 'How do I put a machine in that's going to help automate or improve this process?' And then there's a capstone event for that particular program—actually running the facility for a couple of weeks. I mean, you want to talk about starting at the bottom and working your way up within the university setting? It's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard of as far as what an educational system can offer." Southwest
"We're terrified about retirements. Quite frankly, I don't know where the next five production workers are going to come from. I've told the owners of this company that this is probably the most pressing thing facing us.

We have a program where the students at [MnSCU college], for example, can come and spend an afternoon at our company and we pay them. We've almost got to pay them because they've got to have some money to keep this all going. They walk the floor with our engineers and our maintenance people, and they see the challenging work environment. They see the problem-solving work environment.

I don't know how—one of the things I was afraid of here—we kind of threw this problem over the wall to the educators and said, 'Here, fix this.' But I'm not so sure this doesn't have to be a very tight partnership beyond us throwing the stuff over the wall and expecting the educators to solve it."		 Southwest