Tennessee Colleges Tailor Training to Fit Local Needs
Published Apr 07, 2001
DuPont electrical engineer Ron Bradbury (left) assists Marcellus Hambright with a Foxboro Intelligent Transmitter as part of an industrial maintenance alliance with Chattanooga State Technical Community College.
When VAW of America Inc., a supplier of aluminum components to the automotive industry, started searching for the perfect site for its new manufacturing plant in November 1996, the mission was clear. “We were looking for more than bricks and mortar – we needed mortals,” says David Black, VAW’s corporate director of human resources. “You can build the most expensive, state-of-the-art facility around, but if you don’t have the people to start it up and keep it going, it won’t work.”
The company started out looking at sites in North Carolina and South Carolina, northern Alabama, as well as Tennessee. As a graduate of Nashville’s Fisk University, Black admits that he was somewhat “partial” to Tennessee.
“But when I visited Fayetteville and met the people at the Tennessee Technology Center at Shelbyville, I knew they had the infrastructure in place to train our employees. I had a long list of requirements – things we needed to make this happen. As I went down the list, Carol Lee Snoddy [assistant director at the TTC in Shelbyville] didn’t bat an eye. She just kept telling me, ‘We can do that. We can do that.’
“As I visited other sites, my mind just kept coming back to Fayetteville and that positive attitude. I was also impressed by the quality and character of the students I met.”
Once the company committed to the Fayetteville location, VAW began working closely with officials at the TTC to develop a comprehensive training curriculum before sending team leaders to Shelbyville for training.
“We were amazed by the center’s response, by the effort they put into this project,” Black says. “They made us feel that we were special to them – that our success was their success. We have plants in Phoenix; Ellenville, N.Y.; and St. Augustine, Fla., but we have not seen this kind of commitment from a community before.”
The company started up with 21 employees in the summer of 1998. Today, it has close to 100 workers in Fayetteville, and the TTC continues to keep in touch with VAW.
“Those first employees were very green to this kind of work, but they developed such confidence in themselves,” Black says. “If I had to go back over everything, I would say that the one thing that made this project gel was the time they spent training at Shelbyville – the TTC made all the difference.”
According to James King, vice chancellor for the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR), VAW’s story is not all that unusual. TBR institutions – which include Tennessee Technology Centers and community colleges – are the primary providers of workforce training for the state’s businesses.
“Workforce development is our reason for being,” King says of the TBR system, which directs 46 campuses across the state serving more than 200,000 students.
One of the organization’s primary functions is to encourage partnerships with the business community to ensure a well-educated and well-trained workforce.
Currently, 26 state-of-the-art technology centers offer hands-on training programs designed to meet the needs of local industry and students. Twelve community colleges and one technical institute provide associate degree programs and specialized classroom training. All told, the TBR credentials more than 22,000 Tennesseans each year.
The technology centers and community colleges also provide customized training programs for specific companies and industries.
“Technology centers meet with local companies to discuss the types of programs they need for employees,” says Margaret Mahery, director of the TTC at Athens. “We work with the local chambers of commerce to help recruit new industry into the community, then develop training programs to educate the workforce in the area.”
Mahery says programs at the TTC in Athens vary according to the different needs of local industries. For example, the industrial maintenance program may be different for students wanting to work at M&M Mars, as opposed to those looking to work for Arch Chemicals.
“We have the flexibility of being able to adjust and target classes to our communities and local industry,” says Mahery. “Students can progress at their own pace, and many have secured jobs before they leave the training program.”
In an effort to meet the ever-changing needs of manufacturers, most technology centers and community colleges are using the Internet and moving toward Web-based training. “Because many of the manufacturing jobs in the state have now become automated and computerized, TTCs have responded by adding more computer-based, sophisticated training programs to meet the industries’ needs,” says Board of Regents Chancellor Charles Manning.
“More than 80 percent of the previous traditional manual training programs in industrial maintenance, auto body, machine shop, etc., have become computerized,” King adds.
Still, hands-on training remains an important part of the process. After all, Mahery says, “it’s hard to train someone how to use a machine such as the lathe over the Internet.”
In the case of the DuPont Corp., training challenges tend to be more logistical. The company, which employs roughly 1,400 workers at its Chattanooga plant, produces nylon yarn for the automotive, apparel and other industries.
“We realized that about 67 percent of our maintenance workforce would be retiring in the next five years,” says Joe Perry, a training consultant with DuPont. “We needed a self-sustaining program to prepare our own employees to move up into higher-paying, more technical positions. We didn’t want to have to look outside our organization to fill those jobs. We knew we had good people here – they just needed training.”
DuPont partnered with Chattanooga State Technical Community College to customize an industrial maintenance curriculum in the fall of 1999, and later added a chemical technology training program as well. Today, the company has about 200 employees involved in the two programs.
While much of the training is Web-driven, a certain amount of instruction and lab time is necessary. Challenges arose when the company introduced a rotating shift schedule, with some employees working eight-hour shifts, and others working 12 hours, says Jim Barrott, Chattanooga State’s dean of engineering, environmental and emergency technologies.
“Our instructors have to be pretty flexible because we’re offering courses during both the day and at night,” Barrott says. “Employees switch every two weeks, so they’re in day classes for two weeks, and then night classes for two weeks. We had to get creative.”
In order to accommodate the company, Chattanooga State provides training on-site, with the equivalent of seven full-time faculty members teaching at DuPont.
“DuPont has dedicated some space at its facility to set up a laboratory duplicating what’s going on out on the plant floor,” Barrott says. “It’s a very unique training environment that better prepares employees to handle situations on the plant floor.”
The results speak for themselves.
“Of the 41 employees that have completed the core curriculum, 31 have already been promoted into a higher position,” Perry says. “It’s been a great partnership – our employees are preparing for better-paying jobs, and we don’t have to tap all of our resources trying to manage our training programs.
“Our feeling is that we’re in the business of making nylon, and the community college is in the business of training people – so let’s let them help us.”
Story by Caryn L. Stumpfl
Photo by David Mudd
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