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Manufacturing Summit Seeks Workforce Solutions
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Representatives of the manufacturing sector in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys didn't crowd into Youngstown State University Thursday to be reminded that there’s a drastic shortage of skilled workers in the region.
No, they attended the six-hour event here to identify ways to collectively address the problem, and then left with a conviction to do something about it.
“This is just the beginning,” says Jessica Borza, a member of the Mahoning Valley Manufacturers Coalition, a co-sponsor of the Oh-Penn Interstate Region Manufacturing Summit, the first conference of its kind in the Mahoning Valley. “We’re not just here to talk about it. We’re going to do something.’
The conference, held in the Chestnut Room of YSU's Kilcawley Center, attracted more than 400 executives and managers from manufacturing companies, educators, training specialists and officeholders from Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties in Ohio, and Mercer and Lawrence counties in Pennsylvania.
Borza said that she was impressed with not only the turnout, but also the caliber of those who attended. “All the right business and community leaders are here,” she says.
The conference presented two panels of speakers during the morning, after which those attending broke into seven workshops related to topics on preparing and developing the future workforce of manufacturing.
Borza said the ideas and results of these workshops would be compiled and synthesized in a report of the conference that should be available in several weeks. Then, “an action plan” will be drafted based on these findings, and that plan should be ready in 30 to 60 days, she reports.
The first panel, moderated by Business Journal publisher Andrea Wood, consisted of local executives and their insights as to how the shortage of skilled workers in the region is affecting productivity and could hamper of industry in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys.
Brian Benyo, president of Brilex Industries Inc., Youngstown, and the founding president of the Manufacturers Coalition, said the group was formed as a response to the “skills gap,” a trend that has grown worse as employers today demand a more highly trained and motivated workforce. However, he noted, no one company or industry has the resources to solve the problem on its own.
“The primary driver when I started to reach out was out of the recognition that no one company could solve this,” Benyo said. Today, the Mahoning and Shenango valleys are replete with smaller, more diverse businesses and industries, in sharp contrast than the industrial might of the mid 20th century, when Big Steel ruled much of the manufacturing base in the region.
Training a skilled workforce is taxing on small companies, he said. Therefore, it made sense to create a coalition where all segments of manufacturing can get on board to tackle the issue collectively. “The idea was to bring together our common needs with a common voice,” he said.
Other companies have completely overhauled their way of doing business, ditching more traditional means of manufacturing for more sophisticated and advanced methods.
Mike Garvey, president of M-7 Technologies, Youngstown, said his company’s roots date to 1918, the year his grandfather established a bronze foundry that employed technology not far removed from that used in ancient Egypt. Failing to upgrade such technology is what contributed to the demise of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley, he said.
So, when Garvey was forming M-7, he consciously sought to create a company driven by high technology. “Not just in the equipment, but the manpower,” he said. M-7 today specializes in precision measuring, which requires workers highly proficient in mathematics. “We now have nondisclosure agreements with probably 30% of the Dow 30. We probably have nondisclosure agreements on eight of the nine top national defense contractors.”
The key to sustaining manufacturing is developing the human capital with the skills necessary to make companies competitive.
Two years ago, said Dale Deist, president of Deist Industries, Hadley, Pa., he helped spearhead a program across Mercer County that reached out to school boards in an effort to inform students about the benefits of careers in the skilled trades. He enlisted school counselors to get that message to more students.
His objective was to dispel the myth that vocational education is second-rate. “It's not a trap; it's a benefit. Now, employers have to step up to the plate" and convince young people to join the ranks of the manufacturing sector.
Others on the panel echoed similar sentiments.
“There’s not a skilled labor pool out there,” said Colleen Chamberlain, director of human resources at Xaloy Inc., New Castle. “We as employers need to take to look at our attitudes toward training.”
She noted that it's always a risk for a company to invest money in training an employee because there’s no assurance he’ll remain. Even worse, there’s nothing to stop him from working for a competitor. However, this mindset needs to change.
“Perhaps we need to invest our resources to train those people, whether they're incumbent workers or right out of high school,” she said. “We need to invest.”
Of the 16,000 who last year sought jobs at V&M Star's new $650 million pipe mill, added Trina Rauscher-Cooper, its human resources director, only 10% met the minimum criteria simply to be considered for the 350 positions available.
“We look at technical skills, problem-solving capability,” she said, as well as other core competencies such as work ethic, the ability to pass drug tests and showing up for work. “We continue to develop these competencies,” she said.
A second panel featured a discussion on strategies for attracting, developing and retaining a skilled work force.
Former Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams, now the director of Office of Recovery for Auto Communities in the U.S. Department of Labor, informed the audience that the training resources available through Labor are administered by the Community College Career Training Grant program, a $2 billion program signed into law by President Obama in 2010. The program provides money used for courses at community colleges up to two years that provide training for dislocated workers and those transitioning to other jobs.
“The manufacturers were brought in the discussions from the very beginning to make sure the training conducted in these community colleges or other institutions are relevant to the needs of employers today,” Williams said. “The [Obama] Administration made it a point to invest in those learning sets and those skill sets.”
Another program, Williams said, is geared toward encouraging more women to enroll in apprenticeship programs.
“The key here is to make sure these resources are targeted, and to make sure the training that is being provided is directly relevant so when these individuals come out they have marketable skills that are in demand now,” Williams said.
Across the country, he added, there are more than 600,000 positions open in manufacturing for want of qualified workers.
These qualifications and skills must be honed early in a child's education, said Jim Herrholtz, associate superintendent in the division of learning at the Ohio Department of Education.
“We are currently operating on a minimum competency approach,” he told the audience. “I can pretty much assure you a 15- or 16-year-old student has no idea what any of your industries look like. They think their options are military, college, or the service industry.”
One strategy to attract students is for companies to show them that manufacturing offers dynamic, exciting careers, and these careers demand very high-skill sets to succeed, Herrholtz said. “Not every student is going to college,” he said. Regardless, students must have the basic skills needed to move to a level where these can be cultivated in a manufacturing career.
“Right now, we are not preparing students to be career and/or college ready at the moment,” he warned. “We have got to raise the actual standards for our students” and attract them to transferable hands-on projects.
Registered apprentice programs are one way to attract younger workers to manufacturing, noted Craig Dotson, apprenticeship training program specialist for the U.S. Department of Labor.
He recalled a group of students recruited from a high school in Pittsburgh who tested well, and were selected for an apprentice program, but they had no experience in or exposure to manufacturing.
“One of those students today is the manufacturing manager for a glass company that has a registered apprentice program,” Dotson said. “They’re trained to the point where they’re now highly skilled workers.”
Even as manufacturing opportunities abound, it remains a tough sell to get younger people involved and interested, lamented Dennis Dio-Parker of the Toyota North America Training Center.
For example, Toyota's manufacturing plant in Kentucky hosts a two-year program worth $28,000 that helps nurture and cultivate prospective employees.
"Do you know how many applicants we had last year?" he asked rhetorically. “Thirty-seven.”
The two-year program was recently introduced to another Toyota plant in West Virginia – this time with a company-paid $40,000 per worker stipend, Dio-Parker said.
“We've had it for about a month,” he said. “Know how many applicants we have there? Thirteen.”
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.