Transcript—Skills on Purpose webinar (Friday, July 24, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. ET)

Jeanne Snodgrass: Hello everyone. My name is Jeanne Snodgrass. I’m with RTI International. We are the organization that is working with the Department of Education to produce this webinar series, and we welcome you to the series today. This is the fourth in our series. I just wanted to go through a couple of things with you before we start off. Josh has taken through, taken you through most of the technical aspects. As he mentioned, during the webinar, the audio will stream through your computer speakers, so you can adjust the volume using the computer’s controls or the volume bar on the bottom right of your screen. If you cannot hear the audio through the speakers, then you can dial the number that we have there on the screen and enter the code when prompted, and your telephone line will be automatically muted. If you have any technical issues throughout the webinar, please send a message via the Q&A feature over on the right, or you can call RTI Technical Support at 919-316-3717, and that number will be displayed throughout the webinar. The materials for this webinar and a recording of the webinar itself will be posted to the PCRN within a couple of weeks, and everyone who has been registered for this webinar will receive an e-mail when that, when those materials do go up. At the very end of the webinar, we are going to ask you to take a couple of minutes to give us some feedback about the webinar today, and we will have a link to a participant survey that we will ask you to complete. Again, during the webinar, if you will send any content questions through the Q&A feature over to the right, that will be great. And, with that, I would like to introduce Johan Uvin, who is with the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, who is today’s host.

Johan Uvin: Thank you, and good afternoon, and good morning to those on the West Coast. But thank you for joining us today. My name is Johan Uvin. I’m here with the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, and I will be your host for this event. Today’s session is the fourth in a series of programs developed by this office in cooperation with Commerce Secretary Pritzker to look at how leading practitioners organize partnerships in education and training programs with industry and other key stakeholders for workforce development. Practical strategies and solutions are offered in building consortia to address industry workforce development needs. As we have done at the start of the other webinars in this series, I would like to play now a recorded welcome from Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education.

[Video within webinar] Arne Duncan: Hi, I’m Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education. To continue growing a highly skilled and competitive workforce, we must create a coordinated system for developing the talent of all of our people. This means replacing piecemeal approaches with a systemic approach, or Skills on Purpose. Strengthening our efforts in this area is absolutely a win-win. We’ll support more students by equipping them with the knowledge and skills that they need to succeed in today’s workforce, and we’ll meet the needs of both business and industry. This webinar series focuses on the manufacturing sector, but the approaches discussed here also could be used to address challenges in health care, and IT, and other technical fields. We have a skills gap in this country, and we have to close it. Unless we build a workforce with the skills employers actually need, we simply won’t be able to keep high-skill, high-wage jobs right here in the United States, or attract more companies to hire here. Instead, these opportunities might migrate to countries that take this work more seriously. We simply cannot allow that to happen.

Johan Uvin: Before we move into the introduction of our panel, I wanted to share some administrative notes. This event is being recorded, and the recording will be posted for playback on the Web, along

with archive materials from all the webinars in the series. If you registered, you will receive an e-mail with the link when each becomes available, as well as e-mail invitations for future events. You’re encouraged to ask questions, so you can ask questions via the Q&A window at any time during the webinar, and we are relying on you to help make this of value to all. And we will take as many of the questions and respond to them as time permits.

Lastly, please know that this webinar is not to endorse any person, organization, or approach, but to really bring together practitioners to talk about their work.

Some of you may have joined us for the first three programs in this series, so you will be familiar with some context-setting questions. So, to begin with, let’s see who has joined us today. First, which business or sector are you affiliated with? And be advised that the poll will remain on screen for about 20 seconds. Thank you for doing that, and as was the case with other webinars in this series, it’s very encouraging to see such a great level of cross-sectorial participation.

The second statement is as follows. So, look at the screen and identify which of the statements best describe your current level of involvement in a consortium or some other form of partnership. And again, the poll will remain on screen for about 20 seconds. Again, thank you for your contributions, and it is really encouraging to see that we have a great mix of individuals participating in terms of their level of engagement in partnerships. So, thank you for doing that.

So, what I would like to do next is introduce our panel Chair, John Colborn, and John is the Director of Skills for America’s Future at the Aspen Institute. John?

John Colborn: Thank you, Johan. This is John Colborn. Happy to be joining this webinar today, and good morning, and good afternoon to everyone who’s participating. I am John Colborn, and I direct the Aspen Institute’s Skills for America’s Future program. We work to catalyze and support partnerships between America’s employers and workforce developers and educators, and we do this with the aim of advancing economic opportunity for America’s workers and job seekers, and also addressing the skill needs of employers.

For today’s panel, we have a really interesting and important opportunity to hear about manufacturing partnerships, and let me just take a minute to describe why I think it’s really important that we’re focusing on manufacturing today. First off, I think we’re seeing, as many of us have seen, a resurgence in United States manufacturing. This is, of course, partly a result of the economic recovery and the growth of the economy, but it’s also a function of new dynamics that are hitting the cost structure of manufacturing in the United States. With lower energy costs and higher levels of efficiency, the United States is increasingly competitive in certain manufacturing sectors, and that is really bringing about the opportunity to grow our manufacturing sector. But that’s only going to happen if we have the right skills to perform under these new conditions, which makes the partnerships that we’re discussing today all the more critical for expanding our manufacturing sector.

It’s also an important conversation to have today because of the demographics of the manufacturing workforce in the United States. We know that this is an aging workforce, and the skills that have been developed over decades are in danger of walking out the door with retirement. And so, replacing those skills and making sure that there’s a next generation of manufacturing technologists to take over is going to be critical to the United States.

And then, finally, let me just say that manufacturing is also a critical part of many regional economies. And so, I think as we think about the manufacturing sector, we know that this is a place where many contemporary workforce development practices really come into play. The focus on career and college readiness, for example, and strategies to encourage secondary schools to expose high school students to the world of manufacturing. The use of job-driven strategies for workforce development and technical education that deeply engage employers and work to address the skill needs of employers in particular sectors, and the opportunity to bring to bear experiential learning opportunities—such as apprenticeships, internships, and so on—that will allow students to really experience the world of work to prepare them to be productive on day 1.

Today’s presenters represent two really esteemed and highly successful companies—Siemens and Toyota. They are global manufacturing leaders with complex portfolios of activities and a variety of skill needs. And, importantly, they have a history of partnership with workforce development and educational institutions. Specifically, we’re going to hear from Pooja Anand, who is head of strategic partnerships, strategic projects and talent acquisition with U.S. America Siemens; Shujath Ali, who’s head of the traction business segment of Siemens; and then Dennis Parker, assistant manager with Toyota’s North American production support center. And I think with that, I’m going to turn this over to, to, sorry, I’m going to turn this over to Pooja. Pooja?

Pooja Anand: Thanks, John. Hello everyone. I am Pooja Anand, the head of strategic projects and talent acquisition in the U.S. and Americas, and my colleague, Shujath Ali, who is the head of traction business segment, are both here today to share with you how, at Siemens, we build our manufacturing talent pipelines.

Before we begin, just wanted to share a brief overview of Siemens with you. So, Siemens is a global technology powerhouse, which has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, and quality. We are the oldest, largest company in the world. There are certainly companies that are older and companies that are bigger than us; however, nobody has been around for 165 years and has such a large, global footprint. Like John mentioned, our business portfolio is fairly diverse and includes power generation, renewable energy, building technologies, process industry drives, health care, and financial services. We have 289 manufacturing and production sites across the world, and 80 of these, sorry, 84 of these are in the United States, located over 30 states.

So, after years of decline, U.S. manufacturing is clearly growing again and becoming more competitive. There is a lot of investment in both existing and new manufacturing firms. And for us here at Siemens, that what we have found that as we build our plants around the country, it is, it is a challenge for us to find the right people with the right skill sets to fill the open positions. Typically, there is some sort of a skills mismatch. There’s a disconnect between the skill sets, the unemployed, and the types of jobs that are available. In fact, there’s a significantly low percentage of applicants for our open positions in manufacturing that actually pass the series of tests that we require for hiring.

So, in response to this, we have been forced to look for a new workforce development methodology. Given the diversity of a portfolio like I shared with you a moment ago, one size clearly does not fit all our needs. And our approach has been to build a partnership with the local plant management, and the human resources team collectively works with them to establish the goals. What is the business objective? What is the related workforce gap? What is the talent problem that needs to be solved? And what is the best solution pathway for it? The outcome typically is new hiring and training practices that

will ensure a sustainable, long-term workforce pipeline for that site. Our solutions have ranged across the spectrum. We partner with the local workforce boards and community colleges to upskill local workforce in the area through efforts like pre-employment readiness training, building specialized skills using Siemens training content. We have made thousands of in-kind grants of our software to community colleges and colleges, including some select high schools. Almost 80,000 companies use this software. So, the approach is that if students learn to use it, it gives them a potential career opportunity to work with those companies and not just Siemens. We have also invested in apprenticeship programs in mechatronics, machining, and soon we’ll be kicking off one in robotic welding.

So, today, my colleague, Shujath, will share with you the story of how we partnered with the local community and, more specifically, the local high school to address the talent needs of our Alpharetta manufacturing site in Georgia. Shujath?

Shujath Ali: Thanks, Pooja. My name is Shujath. I head the business, the traction business segment and also am the plant manager in Alpharetta, Georgia. While Pooja, you know, talked about Siemens at large, I’m going to specifically talk about an example from our plant in Alpharetta, Georgia. But before I do that, I’d like to introduce our plant. At Alpharetta, Georgia, we manufacture variable frequency drives for traction rail systems, for mobile mining equipment, and standard industrial applications. We have about 700 employees in our facility, of which about 150 are from the manufacturing software production technicians. The others that comprise of functions like business management, project management, engineering, supply chain, quality, and other functions. A team as we believe in collocating project management, engineering, and manufacturing, you know, from a standpoint of a synergistic value stream. And that’s true of all of our locations.

At our plant, our focus is on quality first, safety always, and we strive to excel at this in everything we do. So, with that, let me talk specifically about our workforce development initiative. We like to call this our solutions wheel. As you can see, Sections 1, 2, and 3 talk about the problem for us, our need. You know, 2008 to 2010 was a slow period for us. You know, we were in a slump. But going into 2010, you know, we were getting out of a slump. We were looking at increased demand, and we had a huge need, large need for manufacturing talent. And we struggled that we were looking for hard skills, soft skills, you know, workforce-specific certifications, and we struggled. We struggled for a long time to find appropriate manufacturing talent in the marketplace. It took us a long time, and when we did find talent, we had to invest quite a lot, you know, time, and money, and effort to get the competencies and the skill levels that we were looking for. So, we had a real need, and out of this need was born the idea that we need to do something about this, and so, we put together a workforce development initiative really looking at the manufacturing talent pipeline for us.

Sections 4, 5, and 6 really talk about how we went about this, our approach, and I’ll get into that in the following slides. And Section 7 covers sustainability. Especially with a program like this, it gets really important to hear from a sustainability, a sustainability standpoint. Even if you don’t want it to be, you know, something that you do now, you want it to be as far as your systems, as far as your processes, something that will remain. So, with that, let me move on.

So, our approach to workforce development was tiered. Our first tier was to look at high schools. You know, that’s the perfect question. You know, students graduating from high schools, are they (1) interested in careers in manufacturing, and (2) do they have the skills to be in manufacturing after they graduate? And the answer is, you know, we realized were no in both the cases. One, there was a stigma

about manufacturing in our community, in our schools, our parents, and (2) they, they must have the manufacturing skills that we needed. And so, we spent a lot of time, you know, trying to think of how do you build these manufacturing skills, manufacturing curriculum into the high schools.

At Georgia, the Department of Education offers about 50 different pathways, and so we look at one of those pathways, which was manufacturing. And so, we partnered with the Georgia Department of Education. We partnered with the Forsyth County school system. Specifically, we chose the South Forsyth High School, and we worked with the high school principal, the manufacturing people at the school, we worked with our own internal manufacturing expert, and we put together a manufacturing curriculum. So, we came up with three courses—Foundations of Manufacturing, Robotics and Automated Systems, and Production Enterprises. And we also want to round this up with some practical application, and so we are currently working on a work-based learning.

So, these three courses, offered sophomore, freshman, and junior years, and as the students, you know, come to their senior year, they would do a work-based learning at our plant so, you know, they can get a more hands-on experience in manufacturing but also have a practical application on the courses that they have learned in the prior 3 years. Now, we could have just, you know, develop the courses, hand them out to the school, and say, “hey, you guys run with this,” but it was important for us to really see how this was being implemented and, you know, what the enrollment rates were in the high school, what kind of feedback we were getting from the teachers and the students. And so, we’ve been in constant touch with the school. Every quarter, you know, we meet with the leadership and school system. We talk about these courses. We talk about enrollment rates. We talk about what worked, what didn’t work, how do we tweak these courses. And, at the end of the year, at the end of every school year, we have focus groups of students and, you know, specifically asking them what did they like about the courses, what excited them, what did they learn, what would they like to learn. And so, we’ve taken that and partially we added to our courses as well.

And also, the courses, we give them projects, real projects from our own operations. So, they’re working on real manufacturing examples and problems, and not just coming up with solutions, but we give them the opportunity to actually come and present their solutions in all-employee meetings, in all-hands meetings at our plant. And this is a great experience, not just for the students because of the exposure that they get, but also for our employees, where they see, you know, how this partnership is working with local schools and local communities. And that works out very good. And, as you can see on the right-hand side, the enrollment rate, we started the first course in the school year 2013–2014. We had about 50 students enrolled in the first course and then had them steady for the following 2 years as well. As you go to course 2 and course 3, the enrollment did drop off. But, you know, we kind of expected that. Students who have an aptitude for manufacturing, they kind of stuck to it, and they’re the ones who are pursuing this.

So, we’re now at the point where we’re putting together work-based learning. We will have three students who will start this fall, this school year, who will come to, you know, to our plant and work, you know, a few hours every day of the school year, where they’ll be learning, you know, hands-on manufacturing. They’ll be putting into practice all the concepts and values they’ve learned in the previous 3 years.

Moving on. So, we have, you know, in addition to what we’ve done and continue to do, is have high school internship programs, and that these are about, you know, 8-week programs with very structured,

with a, you know, a curriculum agenda for the 8 weeks as well. And then we also provide specific trainings, you know, to prepare these students for real-world experience. We teach them, you know, resume writing. We do mock interviews. We do behavioral interviewing with the students to teach them how to interview for jobs. We do, specifically, presentation skills as well. And that’s been working out really good. So, now, the next year to our workforce development is looking at apprenticeships. So, we’ve done the manufacturing curriculums. We’ve done the workforce, the learning, the summer internships, and now we’re looking at apprenticeships where we’re partnering with the local community colleges, Lanier Tech, and we’ve put together a program for our tester functions, our [inaudible] functions, and we’re looking at other functions such as quality and [inaudible], and that’s where we’re taking this.

So, as you can see, it’s not just an initiative that we’ve put together, but we’re kind of building that up to have a complete manufacturing talent pipeline. And, in addition, you know, to keep this, one, you know, like I said earlier, wasn’t just to be, manufacturing skills were lacking in students, but there’s also the cold stigma. So, we also want to make sure that we address that topic as well. And so, we’ve been constantly engaging with schools and communities and parents, and one of the things we do is we sponsor the electric car race. It’s called Electrathon, and we’ve been doing that for 3 years, where students, you know, design and build electric cars and race them. And it’s a great opportunity for employees as well, who act as coaches and mentors to these students in helping them design and build these cars. And that has been an excellent experience for both the students and our employees.

Again, we have our employees participate in the mock interviews with schools. We do a lot of, you know, best practices like plant tours. We bring students on plant tours. We attend the “Parent Days” at schools to talk to parents about manufacturing. And we’re also on the advisory council for Forsyth County schools engineering and manufacturing. We participate in the global skills roadshow. And we’ve had quite a few celebrities as well come to our plant here, and they range from the Secretary of the Treasury, to the mayor of Atlanta, to the governor of Georgia, again, to show that manufacturing is not something that’s from the past. It’s something that we want to revise, and it’s something that we want to promote amongst our students, who we see as the workforce of tomorrow.

And, to wrap this up, you know, key takeaways for us was when you put a program like this, a few ingredients that you need to really look into. One is having ownership. You know, to me, this is my initiative. This is not a management initiative. This is not an HR initiative. The local business owner or [inaudible] manager. This is my initiative. This is part of my mission. It’s part of my strategy. And that’s what makes it real for me and my team. Second, you know, having a project team, a very defined and dedicated project team, a team that believes in this cause, that is passionate about this topic, that can see long-term benefits, and also acknowledge that these benefits take time to realize. Because many times, I know this is work in addition to their regular work, and so without that level of engagement, the team is not going to drive this initiative. So, it’s very important to have a very dedicated and passionate team around this topic.

Second, you have to engage in a real need. For us, it was a real need. We struggle with finding manufacturing talent, so it’s a very real problem for us. And so, a need for us to tackle it, you know, we were completely bought in, and if this had been a management initiative or something, then we probably would not have driven it as much as we have. So, again, it’s got to be based on a real need. It occurred, for us, what has really worked is we’ve done this at our own pace based on the business

conditions of our environment, our, you know, status of our business, our business demand, our affordability to programs and needs. And so, it’s taken, you know, we’ve done it at our own pace. There hasn’t been any pressure from the top or from the bottom, and that makes it, again, very real for the team and myself.

And finally, it’s extremely important to have strong relationships and partnerships, internally, you know, between manufacturing and HR and management, but also externally with schools and school systems, government bodies, with other businesses. And once you have these ingredients, then it does, you know, make for a great, successful program. And we’ve been very fortunate. A lot of things have fallen into very soon. It hasn’t been easy. It’s been a good 5 years since we started this, but we, you know, we think we’ve made a lot of progress with that. So, with that, I’ll hand it over to.

John Colborn: To me. To John. Hi, it’s John Colborn. Hey, listen, I’m just going to ask a couple of quick questions before we hear from Dennis. So, first off, for Shujath, just a little bit, our audience is very curious about the courses that you described a couple slides back. Can you just give us a little bit of texture here briefly? How long are the courses? How is the curriculum established? Who teaches them? How are faculty prepared for those courses? And then, finally, we noticed there’s a drop-off in the participation, particularly when you get to the work experience level, and is that driven by opportunities at Siemens or what have you?

Shujath Ali: Yes. Thanks, John. So, the courses themselves, first, we worked with, you know, both the school teachers, the school systems, but we also worked with manufacturing experts from our own manufacturing locations. And we came up with, you know, principles and topics that we want to include. Again, these courses are not specific to Siemens but they’re applied to the entire industry. It’s taught during the entire semester, so course 1 would be taught in the freshman year, for the whole year, course 2 in the sophomore, and course 3 in the junior year. Again, the teachers, we actually had the teachers come and train at our manufacturing facilities during the summer, so we actually, before we did student internships, we actually did teacher internships, where we had the manufacturing teachers from South Forsyth High who came and worked in our manufacturing environment for the whole summer, where they watched our processes, they worked, you know, they worked on some of our products to understand what we were trying to do. And so, that’s how we help prepare the teachers as well. And again, the enrollment does drop off, but I think, you know, the first year, it’s, there’s a natural curiosity, I think, among the students, and then we see as we go to year 2 and year 3, these are the students who are really looking at a career directly in manufacturing or indirectly by going back to school and becoming more industrial engineers or manufacturing engineers or, you know, going through hardcore, hard engineering courses as well. But so we see that these are the students we are really looking for in the manufacturing talent pipeline.

John Colborn: Thank you so much. That’s great. And Pooja, I wonder if you can hop on and just give us a little bit of a flavor for the locations of Siemens operations, and is this partnership activity happening in just one place? I know that’s actually not the case. Or is it happening in many places around the country?

Pooja Anand: So, it’s happening in, there are different things, different, like I said, workforce solutions in different places. So, at Alpharetta, we have had a focus on high schools. In Charlotte, for example, we’re working more with the community college, the central piedmont. In Sacramento, we’re working with the, you know, Sacramento employment and training agencies. So, based on the location of the plant

and what it needs, we’ve customized to meet the overall, the underlying baseline framework is the same. The approach is the same. The partnership is the same. The solution is customized.

John Colborn: Thank you so much, Pooja. We’re going to now hear from our third presenter, Dennis Parker with Toyota. Dennis, are you there?

Dennis Parker: I’m here. Hello, can everyone hear me? OK, there we go. OK, hello everyone. I would like to thank you for attending the webinar today. Again, my name is Dennis Parker. I work for Toyota’s North American production center. We support all of our manufacturing sites in North America. To us, that’s a business region that covers Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. I know today’s primary audience is probably the U.S. We have 10, 11 direct manufacturing plants in the U.S. What I’m going to do is to give you a brief overview of our advanced manufacturing technician program, and that’s part of a bigger network that we call the advanced manufacturing career pathways. I’ll go back to the initial introduction that was done, which Siemens also confirmed. We all need talent, and we have a very difficult time of getting that talent, and maybe a very big picture of what I’m going to show you, or the big picture of the activity, is we have instituted and continue to institute a method where we can, we can manage the talent pipeline. And so, I’m not going to cover everything that’s on the slide. Some of this you can download later and look at them, I’m going to discuss the high points, but the first thing, the way Toyota looks at this is we ask what the problem is, and we see three key problems that drive us.

One of our, I imagine the problem is there aren’t enough technicians. One of the more, better known studies that have documented this is the Deloitte study from 2011, in which they determined there are 600,000 open positions for skilled technicians in the U.S. Contributing to that, new technicians who are available, very frankly, they’re not work ready. They don’t have the full technical skills. They don’t have many of the work, the work characteristics, the work traits, values, behaviors that we really need to be fully successful in the workplace. And then you compound that with the fact that the technical workforce is aging. If you look at the numbers at DoL, the Department of Labor, there’s a generated, there’s going to be, it’s already started, a tremendous spill out of talent from manufacturing that needs to be replaced. That all coming together presents a huge problem.

So, what we’ve done is we have implemented initially the AMT program, and what that is essentially is it’s a career pathway, and you’ll notice in this graphic, the way we see it, that pathway starts at K–5. It continues all the way through becoming a team member at a manufacturing plant. We have activities at every one of these levels. The hub activity is the 2-year college associate degree, but a key, the key thing to understand is that’s not the program. Really the program is this entire pipeline, which, again, we manage for talent. We reinvented, basically, when we approached this, to address the problems, we reinvented how a 2-year technical degree is done. Typically, it’s a 2-year, 4-semester program, and you take a lot of technology courses. The fully effective worker needs tremendous technical skills, but there needs to be much more than just their technical skills, so the AMT program has three components.

There’s the technical core. It was already there. We’ve actually strengthened that a bit, but we’ve added the manufacturing core exercises. How can you effectively and productively manage your physical workspace in a number of ways? And the six professional behaviors. Those would be attendance, initiative, diligence, interpersonal relationships (ability to get along with people), teamwork, and communication (that’s both verbal and written). And, here’s a key. It’s not a technology program, and these are really important things to have. All three of these are of equal importance. This program

addresses the entire worker, which is why it’s named advanced manufacturing technician, who is a person, and not advanced manufacturing technology, which is only about the technology.

We use every minute of learning that we can. It’s a 2-year program. Students are engaged in productive learning 8+ contact hours a day, 5 days a week, 5 straight semesters. We don’t take the summer semester off. Why are we doing this? AMT is an effort to secure basically a reliable pipeline of global, quality, technical talent so that we can maintain our competitiveness, our U.S. competitiveness in the world business economy.

Now, the bigger picture of the advanced manufacturing career pathways, if you will look at the bottom, you’ll see where K–12 is. It goes up to that red block, AMT, and that career pathway I showed you a few minutes ago that continues to the left. But we also need awesome engineers in manufacturing, and so you’ll notice now that this continues to the right to the AME program, advanced manufacturing engineer. And in the middle, we have advanced manufacturing business because after all, it’s all about business anyway, isn’t it? And so, all of these pathways are integrated to be as seamless as possible, and they’re all highly, highly designed to address the needs of technology in the, in the workplace.

This is a picture. We just wanted to give you a real feel that we’re actually working this entire pipeline with this. And so, you’ll notice at each one of these stages, these are photographs from activities at that stage. The brief introduction for this, if you start at K–5, we’re not talking to K–5 students about manufacturing and how great this is. We just want to get them excited about STEM. We want to stir their interest in STEM so they will continue to be interested. At middle school, we continue to excite them about STEM, but we start introducing manufacturing as a potential career for them. We’re not giving it a heavy push, but in these activities, we bring them to our plants. Other companies that are partnering with us, they go through the plant. They get to see activities. We take them to our college campuses that we, our partner campuses we work with and let them get excited about that. And high school, we’re actually going to the high school, and these are employers going to the high school, taking our message there, shaping our message the way we think is best for manufacturing, engaging with the students there that we want to grow into this career. The next one is the actual 2-year college program itself. Following that, there’s an internship in the skilled portion of that, that eventually grows into a team member’s job. You also see photos here in our advanced manufacturing business and our advanced manufacturing engineering pipeline.

This is a quick depiction of what the actual 2-year program looks like. Here are some things to note. Remember that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 5 straight semesters? If you come down to the week, you’ll see basically a student goes to school all day long, 8 hours, or 8:00 to 5:00, or 6:00 if that’s needed, 2 days a week. They then work with a sponsoring employer the other 3 days, and what they’re doing when they’re on the manufacturing floor is aligned to what they’re learning in school. You’ll also notice this is selective. Technical programs in community colleges have not typically been selective in the past. Health care is selective, thank goodness with that. We’ve brought that into our process, too. I won’t go everything on here. It’s already been mentioned, but it shows you how, in the 2-year program, we integrate all of those elements. The manufacturing core exercises, for example, there are five of them. They’re aligned to the five semesters of the program.

This gives you a view of what it looks like. We’ve changed the learning environment for technical learning. We don’t really think classrooms are that great as a learning environment because they’re not realistic. We don’t have many classrooms out there in the middle of manufacturing floors. So, we

establish at each one of our partner colleges this open emulation in which everything occurs. You don’t have to knock on the door to come in. It basically becomes the home for everything that they do as the AMT student. And here’s a key. Not only do they take classes, but the students, facilitated by the instructors, have to maintain that whole space as if it was a manufacturing environment. They have to practice industrial safety. They have to lock out. They have to maintain the physical environment. They have to use visual workplace organization. They do problem solving and so on.

These are a couple of images to show you the other pathways, the business pathway that we have. Northwood University is our business provider. Our engineering pathway, it’ll use, it does use and will use local engineering schools for that who are in a structured partnership with us.

Now, we’ve talked about Toyota. It did start with us, but it’s no longer about Toyota. As these collaboratives are established in each location, we invite other employers to join us. We call these employer collaboratives “FAME” (federation for advanced manufacturing education), and then in each state, it’s like Kentucky FAME, Alabama FAME, Indiana FAME, and so on. This is just a number. These logos you see are just a partial list of employers who joined us with this. As of today, there are now 126 companies who’ve joined into this effort.

This is a map to show you basically where the program is right now all the way down to Texas. The black ones are where we actually have a Toyota plant, along with the other employers who’ve joined us. The program is becoming very popular. The model is very popular, so it’s beginning to expand beyond Toyota into places where no Toyota plant exists, and that’s what the red little factories indicate.

Kentucky has taken this to a whole new level. In Kentucky, the cabinet for economic development, the community and technical college system has grabbed it. Why is that? They realize this program is turning out a graduate that is remarkably more qualified than has been typical in the past, and it meets a key need of employers. It’s already been mentioned I think twice before, finding that talent is difficult, so the economic development cabinet in Kentucky now promotes this program across the entire state. The community and technical college system has actually turned it into a degree program that can be offered throughout the entire state. Those two come together to be able to make new collaboratives. You can see how it’s spread across Kentucky.

Results. Over 2 years, or excuse me, over 5 years since this has started, so far, we have 100% job placement. And speaking of Toyota, we have an incredibly difficult, hundreds of questions, hours-long test that experienced technicians take to get hired into the company. Less than half can pass it. We have 100% pass rate with our AMT students that we have. All of the students complete all of the manufacturing core exercises. That’s an element that’s in no other college program out there, and 100% of the students have this full set of development in professional behaviors that we mentioned earlier.

I won’t go over this history, but for those who are interested, here’s the very brief history of how this program developed. That’s it. Oh, I do have one more comment. I’m sorry. This seminar is about large manufacturers. This, this program, this activity was designed to accommodate the smallest manufacturer to the largest. So, among those 126 companies, I believe the smallest company has about 15 employees. We have several that have less than 100 employees. So, really, even though it was designed by a large manufacturer, it custom fits the entire spectrum of manufacturers. That’s all.

John Colborn: Dennis, thank you so much for your comments. I wonder if you could just, we’ve had a couple of questions come up on the, on the, on the Q&A about the kinds of populations that are engaged in these courses. Can you just speak a little bit to the kinds of folks that are enrolled in these courses? Are they younger? Are they older? Are they, do you do any specific outreach to, say, immigrants or veterans or other kinds of populations in this work?

Dennis Parker: Yes, yes, and yes. Here’s the quick answer to that. The program primarily targets brand new graduates out of high school. We recommend that about 80% of the selectees that come into the program have just graduated from high school. But then we also recommend that we hold that 20% because that allows to make sure that we have a full impact, to make sure that we don’t miss superstars who have already gone past graduation age. We’ve had one gentleman who came in, had just turned 50 or 51, I think, when he came in. It gives us flexibility for diversity. It gives us flexibility for seeking veterans to do that. Also, because we can manage a pipeline, it’s our intent, we know it’s a hard nut to crack, a long journey, it’s our intent to change the face of the technical workforce, increase the number of females, increase the number of minorities in there. And so, we have a number of activities which very specifically engage with those populations, and, while it’s been slow, we’re seeing growth in those. We’re being successful with that. Does that help answer that question?

John Colborn: Absolutely. Thank you very much. So, we’re now in the Q&A portion of this, of this webinar, and I encourage you to use the Q&A box to state any questions. But I’m going to use the prerogative of the facilitator here just to ask a couple of questions of my own, and I’ll open this up to all three panelists. So, let me just start by asking, you know, from your experience in these projects that you described, what do you think makes for a successful partnership with education and workforce development institutions, and where are there frictions or challenges in these partnerships?

Dennis Parker: Well, since nobody else has, this Dennis. I’ll go ahead and give a, give a quick answer to that. Just off the top of my head, a successful partnership, I think you have to have all of the right players involved in that partnership. I think there has to be a meaningful win for every one of the players or the stakeholders. I believe that the necessary work must be, to make that partnership work, has to be attended to, and that work has to be divided out in a portion to sensibly, I think there needs to be an effective champion for it. So, those are some of the things that I think, or some of the key elements for a successful partnerships.

Shujath Ali: This is Shujath. You know, just to add to what Dennis said. I do agree with what Dennis just said. For us, we didn’t have as many challenges or frictions; however, we did have partners join in right from the DoE to the high school that we went with, partner with, the school system, and internally. And I think, you know, it just happened that we all had a common purpose. We all had a common vision, so it was very easy to come together very soon, and then it was just about working the details. So, having the right players is extremely important if we can all see that this is one problem that we’re trying to work, and so that makes things very, very easy. We were very fortunate in that area from the standpoint.

John Colborn: Pooja, any thoughts from your end looking nationally at this?

Pooja Anand: Yeah. I mean, again, there needs to be a very clear, just like Shujath mentioned, from what we have seen, if we are fighting going towards the same cause, it usually helps us in all situations, in all workforce partners. And we also, like Dennis mentioned, have a flexibility of, we’re looking for talent. We’re not trying to categorize it in one area or the other or a certain age group or veterans.

Whatever, whoever we work with in an educational piece, it helps when that curriculum matches the needs of our manufacturing side, and then we’re able to align on that. Once that happens, then it’s smooth sailing from there on.

John Colborn: Thanks. I’m going to bring our host in, Johan, to ask a couple of questions of our presenters.

Johan Uvin: Thanks, John. A few questions have come in that deal with engagement of different groups. There were questions about parent engagement and informing parents. There were questions about teacher involvement. There were questions about how do you keep students engaged. So, is it possible for the panelists to speak to any of these areas of engagement?

Dennis Parker: OK, so part of what we do, and if I miss one of these, let me know, but I think someone asked about teacher involvement with that. So, because one of the key activities of the AMT program is that we actually engage in the K–12 systems, so when students come to, remember those elementary and those middle students that come? Their teachers and their counselors come with them. They become educated, so they actually become excited themselves about the visits to do that, and we have material for them. Of course, we’re going to the schools at the high school level. So, I would say that we probably have a very high level of teacher-counselor-administrative engagement in the school system. Regarding parents, by the way, to recruit, to effectively recruit students, we think there are five demographics that have to be addressed. The ones I’ve already mentioned, teachers, counselors, administrators, parents, and then the students themselves, of course. And so, we have some varied practices, but it’s very common, for example, when we have the first day of orientation for each year’s new students, we actually invite the parents to attend with their students on the first day, if it’s one of those high school students. Our 50-year-old gentleman, I’m sure, didn’t bring his, you know, with that. But we also have some of our promotional materials and so forth are actually targeted directly toward parents, written in the language that will speak to them, you know, standing in their shoes. So, that’s just a quick overview.

Shujath Ali: Yeah, just to add to what Dennis just said, from our standpoint, again, you know, we find that students get engaged fairly soon, but it’s the parents that we found were challenges. So, we’ve typically participated in the, you know, “Parent Days” at school. We’ve taken our presentations. We’ve, you know, presented to them about manufacturing today vs., you know, many, many years ago. We’ve talked to them one on one, you know. And then, from a student standpoint, we bring them on plants tours to our, you know, our plant. We get to show them what manufacturing’s all about in this day and age. And so, we feel it’s very, very important to do, you know, engage and promote this topic of manufacturing with those parents and students. Teachers do come on board, and we’ve not had an issue with that. With regards to training, like I said earlier, we do, we did before we started the curriculum courses in the schools, we actually did, we offered training for the teachers. We actually brought them on, and they worked an entire summer at our plant learning different methods, practices, going through documentation so that they were well prepared to go and teach those courses. So, we worked quite a bit with the manufacturing teachers at the South Forsyth High School. Thank you.

Dennis Parker: There’s probably one more thing I should mention from the AMT side, too. So, we also seek out what we think are very good STEM organizations, and we think there are a lot of good ones. We think the best one out there is Project Lead the Way. So, one thing we do, we work very closely with

Project Lead the Way. They, in turn, also educate their teachers and communicate with their teachers and so forth, and that becomes a very effective way, a method of teacher engagement also.

Johan Uvin: Thank you. Those were extremely informative responses. Thank you for that. A number of questions have come in around cost. So, some folks have asked what is the average cost per student to make this happen. Other cost questions had to do with how expensive it was to set up facilities, whether it’s training facilities or others. So, perhaps we can hear from the Siemens team first and then from the Toyota team.

Shujath Ali: From a, this is Shujath. From a cost standpoint, again, from an infrastructure ending or preparing for these trainings was not that much. Again, we’re looking at really having the students work in our manufacturing environment. Of course, we have to very clearly define what they can do and what they cannot do. There was also a question on here, can they, what kind of machine they work. So, we’re very specific, taking into account primarily safety of the students. From a cost standpoint, though, training infrastructure’s not much. We did have to, you know, spend quite a bit on the teacher training. We were paying them through the summer so that they would come and learn. And the same token, where we see the cost more is in the work-based learning, where we are, you know, offering both summer internships and also the work-based learning that we will be starting. So, we’re paying them, I think, you know, about $12 an hour, and they will be there for, you know, for the whole school year. Again, where we have, where we have to be very careful is, for two reasons. One, from a safety and risk standpoint, but also from affordability also. We said, you know, we can maybe take on four students at this point. More because this is the first year that we’re going in. Not so much from a cost-constraint, but also from a, since this is the beginning, we want to understand what kind of issues might come up, and then we might expand that program. So, the main cost for us has been more in the work-based learning, not so much in the curriculum or developing the curriculum or the infrastructure for the training itself.

Dennis Parker: The answer’s very similar on our side. The cost is probably not as high as people anticipate, and realize that so many companies, we have some different, we like to leave company flexibility in how they address it with that. But, for example, just a quick example, we don’t ask the schools to go out and build great, new palaces of learning for this. That open manufacturing emulation that you saw the picture of, if they have a space there, and we say, “let’s first take a look at using existing equipment.” Also, with many companies participating, and realize the companies work very closely with one another. This is employer-driven, by the way. This is not school-driven, it’s employer-driven. We’ve had many, many donations of equipment from the employers, refurbished equipment, and, in some cases, new, to the school campus. And so, you’ll find full-sized, industrial robots and so forth throughout these campuses that we have.

Speaking of students, the basic model for the student is, is we don’t want to give them a scholarship up front and say here, have a wheelbarrow of money. What we do is we look at those 3 days of work, we analyze how much school cost is, and we make sure they make enough during those 3 days of work to pay their school costs. They essentially get a full-ride scholarship, but they have to work and earn it every day through good work behaviors—come to work on time, get along with people, learn, accomplish, they have to attend school on time, and get their grades. It’s very, very effective. But, for us, we’re getting work returned for that. We’re paying for work, but we’re getting something in return, so that’s not actually an extra cost. Some companies do pay their tuition and do pay their books, but a

community college, that’s not an incredibly high cost. More to it than that, but that gives you a feel for it.

We conduct an annual conference for all the programs across the U.S. to come together. That’s one of our primary places of sharing learning and bringing everybody—students, colleges, employers—up to a new level. We do that conference for about $10,000. That’s all.

John Colborn: So, I’m going to take back the role of interrogator here. And I ask a question to the panel about what it takes to sustain these partnerships over time. What seem to be the ingredients both for your own company and your employer partners in this work? And what seem to be the ingredients at the educator or workforce developer level that seem to make these partnerships successful over time? And maybe we could hear from our Siemens team first.

Shujath Ali: Yeah, this is Shujath. I’ll take that one. You know, from the Siemens standpoint, in some ways, it’s very important to have a very dedicated team. Because, you know, things change. Management changes, you know, organizations. You know, we have reorganizations and stuff like that. It’s very easy for the team to get lost in that. And then many times, we’re doing this in addition to our regular work, so having a very clearly defined project team who has ownership of this, who is fully empowered to do this is extremely important, and we’ve been very fortunate to have some of us to remain on this since we started this initiative, like Pooja and myself and a few others. And so we kind of maintain that.

Externally, it’s having a close relationship, I mean a strong relationship, but also being very much in contact with schools. So, we meet on a monthly basis, we meet with our high school partners. On a quarterly basis, we meet with not just our high school partners, but our, the school’s county leadership team as well. And we talk about the program, what’s working, what’s not working. And I think that’s extremely important because it’s very easy to get lost in work, and I think that’s when the sustainability starts dropping off.

The other thing that we’re working on, I think maybe, you know, Toyota, they’ve been more successful, is having that consortium of companies, and that’s where we’re heading next to make sure we have a consortium because, again, by ourselves, we will not be able to sustain this for too long, especially when you have 50 students enrolling, and we can only offer four to six to eight maybe work study, work-based learning. And so, I mean, a consortium is also very important for a long-term sustainability process.

Pooja Anand: And only one other thing I’d like to add that is common for us across all businesses. It’s having it closely tied to a business goal because once it is tied to a specific target, the funding, the approach is bought into, and irrespective of the business cycle, you always have support for that program. So, internally, it’s not just nice to have, it is very closely linked to a business imperative.

Dennis Parker: And I would add this to what Siemens has already said, maybe three things that occurred to me. Each stakeholder must be committed to sustaining the partnership as a priority. After it’s been in place for awhile, maybe they already said this, you can’t let it slide back to second or third or fourth place. Second thing I would bring in, you must have a good, administrative work process. Your work has to be something which helps you, which is not an obstacle. So, who does what when? Who organizes the recruiting activity? Are you meeting on a regular basis? What’s coming out of those meetings? And the third one, maybe most important, and I think this was addressed there, but I’ll say it again. The

activity must continuously produce the results that all the stakeholders need. There are four key stakeholders in our program—students, schools, employers, and economic development. Is everybody getting what they need, and if they do, it’ll fly on its own.

John Colborn: So, for our last question, then, I’d like to drill down on both Dennis’ last comment and, Pooja, your last comment about the idea of a business goal operating here. And I think it would be helpful for this audience to understand the business calculus around participating in and sustaining these partnerships over time. So, maybe you could give us just a little bit of a window into how you, what are the kinds of metrics or outcomes that you are looking for as employers participating in these programs. How do you measure those? How are you asked to account for those? And how does the company think about its return on investment for these kinds of programs?

Dennis Parker: OK, so this Dennis. So, in looking at that, ROI, maybe three or four things very quickly. One, remember, one of the big problems that we have is the talent pipeline is empty. So, I would say the first we look at, are we getting a number of new people that we can put on our working floor every year that meets our staffing needs? So far, the answer to that’s yes, and we didn’t have that before. And we can count those numbers, right? How many openings do we have? How many people do we have available? Second question. Given the fact that these are new technicians, they’re not highly, you know, they’re not 20-year people yet, are these new technicians, do they have the skill sets they need, and can they effectively engage those skill sets? Do they have, do they attend, do they have initiative? All of the stuff that we’ve referred to before. We measure that a number of different ways. Objectively, we have evaluations. We actually do have some metrics in the system that we look at. But here’s the gut-level check. There’s supervisors on the floor. Are they happy with them? Are they unsatisfied? Right now, they’re ecstatic. In fact, they’ll fight to get those people assigned to them. However, we’ve also done another kind of metric. We’re continuing to work on it. And here’s the thought. Will better talent on the floor actually lower your operational downtime enough, that’s money, downtime is money, right? So, how much downtime do we have to lower to make up the cost of the program? And, of course, in a manufacturing plant, downtime is very expensive. We’re finding out that if we save a matter of a few minutes a year, the program pays for itself, and the talent level that’s coming out of AMT is so much higher. Everybody is convinced de facto that we’re going to significantly go over that goal. There’s the short answer.

Pooja Anand: And pretty much, I echo what Dennis said, except the other piece you look at is the cost of not doing this. Because if the talent doesn’t exist and what we have been doing previously is hiring them, bringing them in, spending extensive amount of money on training, hoping they get there. So, that is a systematic approach, and so, we end up again, the quality performance, all of those things. And one other anecdotal piece that we have seen to the high quality of these types of talents increases the overall standard of the shop floor as well.

John Colborn: Great, and I think I pass this back to Johan to take us out here.

Johan Uvin: Thanks, John. Let me start by thanking you, John, Pooja, Shujath, and Dennis for, first of all, for your leadership in this area of work, but also, I think, for a very valuable and informative discussion today. Also want to thank all those who participated as well as all the staff on the different teams that have made this possible, including Greg Henschel on our team here. Just want everyone to know that the event room will remain open for 15 minutes so that you can download a copy of the presentations as well as any supplemental materials that Dennis provided. You can do so by clicking on the file in the

bottom right of your screen. If you have questions or comments about today’s session, we encourage you to write us at SkillsOnPurpose@ed.gov. And know that we value your feedback, and please click on the link displayed on the last slide, and this will take you to a brief survey about your experience with today’s event. I would appreciate it if you could take a few moments to provide your anonymous feedback. Please also keep an eye out for an invitation to our next program, which is called Scanning for Regional Skill Needs: Going Beyond the Data, and that session will be held on September 8. This concludes the formal part of our session today, and we wish you a great weekend.