Vincennes University officials met with manufacturers from around the state on Monday to take the first steps to increasing the labor force in advanced manufacturing.
The school already has a work-study partnership in place with Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Princeton, where students attend class at VU three days a week while working at the plant twice a week to get hands-on training and earn money to pay for their college education.
Timothy Hedrick, supervisor for VU's advanced manufacturing technology program, said students can earn as much as $30,000 while in the program, which could, with planning, cover all of a student’s education expenses.
And, he added, the industry itself is growing while losing an aging population of traditional workers. Right now, nationwide, there are approximately 600,000-700,000 jobs going unfilled because workers simply don’t have the skill sets employers are looking for.
VU president Dick Helton said the program is the first of it’s kind in Indiana and has potential to reach each corridor of the state.
“This program is incredibly advantageous for a number of reasons,” he said. “First, it’s huge for a student to take advantage of the incredible resources and be molded into the worker the industry needs for their own job security in the future.
“The second part of it is that it allows VU to have presence in other parts of the state.”
Helton said that while VU has a southern and especially southwestern Indiana “pretty well covered,” with the new program “we’re expanding our reach to northern Indiana and we have people, right now, in Lafayette.”
“That says to our state VU has a strong advanced manufacturing program and as a result, our state, our students, our partners all benefit,” he said.
Helton said as the industry changes with the emergence of new technology and current workers retiring, the university is working with industry leaders to recruit students out of high school, filter them into the two-year associate program in conjunction with manufacturer sponsorships and then on into the workforce.
The university works with the manufacturers to dictate what the course work for the degree programs will look like to generate a pipeline of sustainable workers, he added.
“If we want to retire, which most of us do, we need the industry to continue, and we need to develop the workforce to find a way to do what we do, but better,” said Leah Curry, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana's vice president of manufacturing. “In the next five to 10 years, 50 to 60 percent of our skilled technicians will retire and leave the industry.
“We have to have a good base (of replacement workers) to know the industry will continue to thrive.”
Kenneth Boone, a group leader for the program with Toyota, said drawing from a pool of potential workers local to the area increases the likelihood of retention for a company.
“This is an effort to secure a reliable and consistent pipeline of global quality technical talent to sustain and improve advanced manufacturing operations,” he said. “This is a way to keep manufacturing in the U.S. and to keep skilled workers at home, making six-figure salaries.”
Seven more southern Indiana companies are on tap to work alongside VU, with talks going on for at least three more in northern Indiana to join next year.