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.