Campaign to address need for skilled manufacturing workers
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The Fort Wayne-based Don Wood Foundation is launching an initiative to accelerate interest in careers in advanced manufacturing in northeast Indiana, particularly among students.
Ignite Advanced Manufacturing is an awareness and coalition-building campaign the foundation says aims to help address a growing need for skilled workers in advanced manufacturing.
The foundation says the number of jobs in the sector is expected to grow to nearly 31,500 by 2028. However, only 460 students in Allen County were enrolled in advanced manufacturing courses during the 2022-23 academic year.
Foundation President and CEO Laura Macknick told Inside INdiana Business the campaign will be used to bring multiple partners together.
“There’s a lot of good work happening around the around the region with advanced manufacturing,” she said. “There’s manufacturing experiences. There’s all of these opportunities to connect students to manufacturing educational and awareness building opportunities. The challenge is that there’s no organization coalescing those efforts.”
The foundation says the campaign will utilize a mix of targeted digital marketing, experiential marketing and in-person engagement to drive increased awareness of and interest in advanced manufacturing as a career path.
The campaign will focus on students and adult learners, the foundation said, as well as educators, counselors, parents and local leaders who could help inspire the next generation of advanced manufacturing talent.
Macknick said the foundation is taking a two-pronged approach to addressing the future shortage of workers in the sector, the first being overcoming a perception gap in manufacturing.
Many people still think of manufacturing as being dark, dirty, dingy; there’s a very antiquated stigma that exists with manufacturing that’s just not true,” she said. “It’s innovative. It’s robotics. It’s AI. There’s cybersecurity. There’s so many different roles and advanced manufacturing that are needed.”
The other approach is addressing a skills gap and making sure that people have the training and education they need to enter the advanced manufacturing workforce.
Macknick said bringing together organizations, industry, academia, students, and the community together as a coalition to change those gaps will be a key marker in the campaign’s success.
“It’s generally an understanding of what advanced manufacturing is. If you ask 20 different people what is advanced manufacturing in today’s day and age, you’ll get probably 20 different answers,” she said. “And so there’s a desire to bring awareness to what it means when we say advanced manufacturing.”
The Don Wood Foundation focuses on strengthening the manufacturing sector in Adams, Allen, DeKalb, Grant, Huntington, Kosciusko, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, Wabash, Wells and Whitley counties.
However, Macknick says the campaign is one that could be replicated elsewhere throughout the state.
“It would be certainly a model that could emerge that other entities could launch in their own community across the state in areas where advanced manufacturing is a key driver in their economy as well,” she said.
You can learn more about the Ignite Advanced Manufacturing campaign by clicking here.