Training

It’s hard for Babatunde Ogunnaike to contain his excitement at the thought of a new federal grants program aimed at improving the U.S. manufacturing workforce. Last week, President Barack Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a bill setting policy for all activities at the Department of Defense (DOD). Buried within the 969 pages of legislation (S. 2943) is a manufacturing engineering education program to be run by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Ogunnaike, dean of engineering at the University of Delaware (UD) in Newark, has been an advocate for the program ever since two Washington, D.C.–based think tanks first floated it 4 years ago as a network of manufacturing universities.

It’s been a crusade for many manufacturers for years: the battle against an out-of-date public perception of manufacturing as dirty, repetitive work that’s possibly unsafe and probably a dead-end career path. Two recent surveys show that there’s still a lot of work to do in dispelling that myth—but a third offers some hope.

The Wonkblog, a regular business feature on The Washington Post website, tackled the need for skilled labor among U.S. manufacturers in its Dec. 15 post. The news item features the plight of the Mursix Corp., an Indiana company that produces seatbelt buckles and bed frames, and has had trouble finding skilled workers to help keep up with the company's growth. It's a story that's been repeated throughout the news media on a fairly regular basis for the past couple of years. What caught my eye with this particular article, however, was a comment from Michael Hicks, a business professor at Ball State University in Muncie, which is where Mursix is located.

A group of long-term unemployed men last week received high-tech manufacturing training certificates from the Central Massachusetts Workforce Investment Board and MACWIC (Manufacturing Advancement Center Workforce Innovation Collaborative) at the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MassMEP) in Worcester, Mass.

Students at the Middlesex County Vocational and Technical Schools in East Brunswick, N.J., recently earned some media attention for making a device that enables a disabled man to toss a ball from his wheelchair and play fetch with his service dog.

A partnership between AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology,  McLean, Va., and the National Institute for Metalworking Skills (NIMS) is expected to increase access to apprenticeships and assist employers in developing new programs that reach diverse talent pools, according an AMT news release issued Nov. 15.

To spur significant innovation and growth in advanced manufacturing, as well as save over $100 billion annually, U.S. industry must rectify currently unmet needs for measurement science and "proof-of-concept" demonstrations of emerging technologies. This is the overall conclusion reached by economic studies funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of four advanced manufacturing areas used to create everything from automobile composites to zero-noise headsets.