Aug 30, 2017

“After decades of pushing bachelor’s degrees, U.S. needs more tradespeople” By Matt Krupnick, The Hechinger Report FONTANA, Calif. — At a steel factory dwarfed by the adjacent Auto Club Speedway, Fernando Esparza is working toward his next promotion. Esparza is a 46-year-old mechanic for Evolution Fresh, a subsidiary of Starbucks that makes juices and smoothies. He’s taking a class in industrial computing taught by a community college at a local manufacturing plant in the hope it will bump up his wages. It’s a pretty safe bet. The skills being taught here are in high demand. That’s in part because so much effort has been put into encouraging high school graduates to go to college for academic degrees rather than for training in industrial and other trades that many fields like his face worker shortages. Now California is spending $6 million on a campaign to revive the reputation of vocational education, and $200 million to improve the delivery of it. “It’s a cultural rebuild,” said Randy Emery, a welding instructor at the College of the Sequoias in California’s Central Valley. Standing in a cavernous teaching lab full of industrial equipment on the college’s Tulare campus, Emery said the decades-long national push for high school graduates to get bachelor’s degrees left vocational programs with an image problem, and the nation’s factories with far fewer skilled workers than needed. “I’m a survivor of that teardown mode of the ’70s and ’80s, that college-for-all thing,” he said. This has had the unintended consequence of helping flatten out or steadily erode the share of students taking vocational courses. In California’s community colleges, for instance, it’s dropped to 28 percent from 31 percent since 2000, contributing to a shortage of trained workers with more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree. Research by the state’s 114-campus community college system showed that families and employers alike didn’t know of the existence or value of vocational programs and the certifications they confer, many of which can add tens of thousands of dollars per year to a graduate’s income. “All throughout high school, they made it sound like going to college was our only option.” Derrick Roberson, who is training to...

Mar 14, 2017

“Why Universities are Important to Rebuilding US Manufacturing” By Michele Nash-Hoff, President, ElectroFab Sales, IndustryWeek The United States needs more engineers to rebuild American manufacturing, and universities play a key role in providing this education. The fact that more and more manufacturers are returning manufacturing to the U. S. or keeping manufacturing here instead of moving to Mexico or Asia is good news, but on February 23, 2017, President Trump met with two dozen manufacturing CEOs at the White House. While they “declared their collective commitment to restoring factory jobs lost to foreign competition,” some of the CEOs “suggested that there were still plenty of openings for U.S. factory jobs but too few qualified people to fill them. They urged the White House to support vocational training for the high-tech skills that today’s manufacturers increasingly require…The jobs are there, but the skills are not,” one executive said during meetings with White House officials that preceded a session with the president.” “We were challenged by the president to … come up with a program to make sure the American worker is trained for the manufacturing jobs of tomorrow,” Reed Cordish, a White House official, said after Thursday’s meetings.” Training today’s workers in the skills they will need for the jobs of the future in manufacturing is important, but we also need to educate the next generation of manufacturing workers. We need more engineers to rebuild American manufacturing, and universities play a key role in providing this education. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. David B. Williams, executive dean of the Professional Colleges and dean of The College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, located in Columbus, Ohio, to discuss the role universities are playing in rebuilding manufacturing and educating the next generation of manufacturing workers. His official biography on the university website states, “Williams is involved in many university-industry economic development partnerships. He serves on the boards of ASM International, the State of Ohio’s Third Frontier Advisory Board, Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (formerly American Lightweight Materials Manufacturing Innovation Institute), Columbus 2020, Metro Early College STEM School, EWI, Ohio Aerospace & Aviation Council, and the Transportation Research Center.” Dean Williams said, “Ohio State University...

Sep 29, 2016

By Jacob Beningo, DesignNews The lesson that every engineering graduate quickly learns after graduating college is that despite being educated for years on engineering theories and practices, they are ill prepared for the real world. In order to smoothly transition into the practical, here are a few tips every engineering student should ponder. Tip #1 – At a Minimum, Learn Python We live in a digital world controlled by software. Software drives everything in our modern world and every engineer whether your expertise is electrical, industrial, mechanical, or sanitary should understand programming language fundamentals. There are times when something needs to be automated or test data needs to be analyzed where knowing how to write a few lines of code can make the job orders of magnitude easier. A great cross platform and easy-to-learn language is Python and a great language for those engineers looking to round out their skills in the pragmatic. Tip #2 – Take a Business Course Once an engineer, not always an engineer. We often start our careers on the front lines; developing, designing, programming, testing, and so on. For many engineers, their careers quickly take a turn into project management, marketing, and sometimes even running a business. The problem is that engineers aren’t taught these skills in the standard engineering curriculum. Taking a course on business or marketing can give engineers insights into how their employers businesses operate and provide the skills they need further into their careers. Tip #3 – Get Hands-On Hands-on, practical experience will trump theory any day. Understanding the theory for how a UART works and actually making it communicate are two totally different animals. Engineering students need to get hands-on by experimenting, developing, and playing with the technologies that they will one day be using in industry. Embedded developers can easily purchase a low-cost development kit and write code. Electrical engineers can design circuits and PCBs using freely available software and practice soldering surface mount components. Mechanical engineers can use freely available CAD software and then use a 3D printer to test their design. The possibilities are endless and make great examples to show and tell during interviews. Tip #4 – Speak, Write, and...

May 26, 2016

By Frank Vogl, The Globalist The man who coined the term “emerging markets” now foresees a great future for “rustbelt” cities. Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, says, “We are in an economic disaster. And it can get worse. Much worse.” More thoughtful people, such as Edward Luce, columnist for The Financial Times, engaged in similar pessimism, when he penned his latest book, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. Western Europe may appear to be just as grim, with persistent low levels of economic growth, high unemployment and the rise of radical political parties, mostly on the right, in some cases also on the left, in quite a number of countries. Needed: A turnaround But not all is lost – far from it. About 18 months ago, I had a chat with an old friend, Antoine van Agtmael, who told me that he was deep into researching the revival of America’s “rustbelts” – those once great blue-collar manufacturing cities who had fallen on hard times. Cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit and Akron lost tens of thousands of jobs as entire industries moved abroad to take advantage of cheap labor and low overall production costs. I first met Antoine in the early 1980s when I joined the World Bank and heard of his work on private sector investment at the Bank’s affiliate, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Antoine subsequently gained global notoriety because he was the first to come up with the term “emerging markets.” He then left the IFC to establish a successful emerging markets investment firm. At a minimum, his looking at American “rustbelts” is significant as he has a proven track record of seeing economic opportunities in many parts of the world where prospects seemed far from encouraging. Examining the rustbelt In recent years, Antoine met some of the most successful chief executives of emerging market companies, including those that to the outrage of Trump have benefited from the “offshoring” of U.S. production. Some of these executives said they were increasingly worried about new competition from the U.S. and also from Western Europe. Antoine, who came to live in the U.S. from Holland, chatted with...

Mar 24, 2015

“Lawmakers Hope To Designate, Fund ‘Manufacturing Universities’ “ By Andy Szal, Manufacturing.net A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation that would provide 25 universities with federal funding to bolster programs relating to manufacturing. The bill would establish a program within the U.S. Commerce Department to select 25 “Manufacturing Universities.” Qualifying campuses would receive $20 million over four years to meet goals related to engineering, job training, manufacturing entrepreneurship and partnering with manufacturing companies. “We need our engineers to fill the growing demand for manufacturing workers and accelerate manufacturing’s growth,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware. “This bipartisan bill would help us meet that challenge.” “As a small business owner who worked in manufacturing for over 35 years, I understand the difficulty in training and finding qualified manufacturing workers,” added Rep. Chris Collins, R-New York. “To expand manufacturing in the United States, we need to have a workforce capable of filling these skilled jobs.” The director of the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology would oversee the program in coordination with the Energy and Defense departments and the National Science Foundation. Coons and Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-South Carolina, introduced similar legislation during the previous session of Congress, but the measure did not advance through the Senate’s education...