On Wednesday, February 25, FLATE participated in a half day forum focused on Work-Based Learning hosted by Johnson & Johnson Vision Care (Jacksonville) and sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers Manufacturing Institute. More than 60 people attended including representatives from the Florida TRADE consortium, state and community colleges, regional industry workforce development and others. The Manufacturing Institute provided some national data about the current and future skills gap for manufacturing. This information underscored the huge need for educated and trained professionals to service the manufacturing workforce in the next decade. CareerSource Florida provided similar information about this skills gap in Florida. Following those brief introductory remarks to set the stage, the audience heard from small and large manufacturers about their needs and work-based learning programs. Allowing that many manufacturers have college programs for engineering and science interns, the conversation quickly turned to the technical workforce below the four-year professionals.
In Florida, the growing complexity of the manufacturing workforce is constantly lowering the technical employment opportunities for unskilled workers.(Opportunities manufacturers relied on for decades.) The focus of the next panels was how to get a simple message to young people that “there are great and exciting skills-focused jobs and careers in manufacturing waiting for you after a couple years of post-secondary education and/or training.” We just have to get students to buy into this fact. Johnson and Johnson Vision Care, a large multi-national company and Metal Essence, a small Florida-based company, related their new experiences with partnering with schools and colleges to provide on-the-job experiences as well as lessons learned and plans for the future. Most importantly, Al Stimac from Metal Essence summarized the Florida statute that deals with high school students as related to work they can do and the limitations on the number of hours worked without added company investment and liability.
Last year, FLATE hosted its 11th annual National Visiting Committee (NVC) in Miramar, FL. Usually these meetings are held at an industry location somewhere in the state. This year, however, we met at FLATE’s host institution and campus, Hillsborough Community College Brandon campus. The FLATE NVC provides advice, advocacy, assessment and assistance not just at this one strategic meeting each year, but also more informally, during the months in between. We are proud of not only the size of our committee, but also its composition of 12 dedicated individuals with interest in the state of manufacturing technician education in Florida and across the country. A typical one-and-half to two-day meeting agenda includes a number of standard “sessions” including:
FLATE will best achieve its mission in partnerships among other organizations locally,
regionally, statewide, and nationally. We have active and ongoing partnership projects with a number of organizations – some big, some small, some narrowly focused and others crosscutting. We use our FLATE guiding & operating principles to help determine if and how we should engage with other groups. We want our partnership projects to be richly meaningful, mutually beneficial to all involved and broaden FLATE’s impact on manufacturing education, outreach, professional development, and to strengthen our intellectual merit. Our partnership projects have defined tasks, deliverables and projected outcomes that we would like to achieve. FLATE also has non-specific project partnerships with a number of organizations. These organizations have shared mission and visions, and we call on each other for events and activities which also have mutually compatible goals. You can read more about our current partner and partnership projects on our website at https://fl-ate.org/partners.
Florida” Industry Tours for K12 students across the state to celebrate Manufacturing Day/Month. It’s been demanding, but rewarding at the same time. We know that this effort makes a difference. The most recent ‘manufacturing perception’ survey conducted by the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte captures a high level impact/correlation between ‘being familiar’ with manufacturing and the likelihood for considering a job/career in the field. Family members who are familiar with manufacturing are twice as likely to encourage their child to pursue manufacturing (“Overwhelming Support: U.S. public opinions on the manufacturing industry”, 2014 Deloitte Development LLC).
Million Women Mentors (MWM) is a collaboration of more than 58 partners, 30 sponsors with 30+ state leadership teams.The Million
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Photo Courtesy: Muller Elem Magnet (Twitter Feed) |
Women Mentors Leadership Council is chaired by Cisco, PepsiCo, Sodexo, and Tata Consultancy Services. To date, over 300,000 pledges to mentor girls and women in STEM have been made on their website (www.millionwomenmentors.org). The program is reaching over 30 million girls and women across the U. S. MWM supports the engagement of one million science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) mentors (male and female) to increase the interest and confidence of girls and women to persist and succeed in STEM programs and careers.
In August, Florida joined the ranks of the leadership teams when Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) pledged to mentor 500 young girls in the district schools. The plan is to mentor five girls at the 100 schools who signed up to support the project. Each Tampa mentor will spend 20 hours with its mentee/s either in person at the school, online, or however they work out. Other recommended methods of mentoring include paid internships and apprenticeships, workplace mentoring at a company, and through sponsorships. Anyone interested in mentoring can connect through the MWM web portal directly with a MWM partner including HCPS. It’s simple to sign up and simple to report your effort. One volunteer mentor at a time, HCPS hopes to start changing lives of young girls and women by providing guidance, examples, experience, and enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Mentoring can help build confidence in young women to know their capabilities and be proud and strong so they will persist in careers that are often male-dominated.
From the White House communications on the www.manufacturing.gov website, the goal of the 40 plus manufacturing institutes to be created over the next ten years is to enable U.S. industry and academia to solve the “scale-up” challenges that are relevant to industry. This National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) is and will be working to create competitive, effective, and sustainable ‘manufacturing research-to-manufacturing infrastructure’ quickly moving research to plant floors as innovative products and production processes.
To date, six Manufacturing Innovation Institutes have been awarded with several more in the pipeline to be announced and funded in the near future. The specific technology foci of the current institutes are defined in the table below. The most recently funded institute will be housed in Rochester, NY, and led by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York and is focused on photonics.
At the recent HI-TEC conference (www.highimpact-tec.org) in Portland Oregon, FLATE assembled a panel with representatives and information from some of the NNMI institutes to share their overall missions and goals. One of the key intent of this HI-TEC session was to bring the NNMI mission to the attention of ATE centers so members of the NSF ATE community could start thinking about how to participate in their workforce development strategies. Dennis Thompson from the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII), University of Illinois Lab in Chicago, IL, and Major General Nick Justice from the Power America Innovation Institute (located at North Caroline State University in Raleigh, NC) gave overviews of their specific missions and goals including their workforce foci. There were many questions and lively discussions with the HI-TEC audience who were particularly interested in the institutes’ plans for workforce development and the visions that these two had for the future innovations of their focus technologies. The current and planned manufacturing innovation institutes are required to have workforce plans in their portfolios and NSF ATE centers and projects were recommended as potential partners for this aspect of the institutes.
in the National Academy building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. The symposium was part of a research project commissioned by the NAS Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy to investigate a number of different aspects of middle skill jobs. First, there is the question of how we define middle skill jobs. Next, an ad hoc committee is exploring the attributes and aspects of these jobs. Finally, current labor workforce needs that impact the coverage, effectiveness, flexibility, and coordination among the nation’s programs to prepare Americans for technically oriented, skilled positions in the workforce demanding non-routine problem-solving skills, but requiring a baccalaureate degree was examined. The education and training systems under study include: apprenticeship programs offered by schools, unions, and employers; high school career and technical education (CTE) programs; advanced technical education and training in community colleges and for-profit colleges; employer-financed and provided training; federal education and training programs; state learning exchanges; public-private employment training partnerships; and licensing and skills certification.
As many of you know, the National Science Foundation has funded FLATE for many years. Between
writing, implementing, and reviewing proposals for all sizes and kinds of projects, I thought there was not too much we didn’t already know about NSF. However, when NSF announced that it was “coming to town” for one of its regular grants workshops, I decided to attend. The two-day event provided an enormous amount of information presented in very interactive, intense sessions so attendees could ask a lot of questions – which we all did. There was the expected bountiful information about ongoing and new programs in the different disciplinary directorates; the nuts and bolts about FastLane, (www.flastlane.nsf.gov) including a few ‘NEW’ nuts and bolts we needed to know and learn about; hot tips from the Inspector General’s office about how to avoid a permanent position inside a federal penitentiary; fine details about the “gold standard” NSF merit review process; and a lot of what’s new in policies and procedures. It was fascinating to hear that a lot of what is “new” in the policy arena is driven by efforts of the federal government to have more policy and procedural consistency across its many funding agencies.
Although there was a lot to learn about what is new and what is changing that affects FLATE, I decided to slip
away to the “dark side” for one breakout session to attend the breakout session on “Award Cash Management Service (ACM$) and Financial Reporting.” Wow – it was truly amazing! I did almost leave when the presenter asked if there are any principal investigators in the room and kindly suggested that the few of us who raised our hands, might not really want to be in his session. FLATE has a good relationship with our college Grants Accounting team and thought I knew what they “did” for us, so decided to stay, despite the warning. But, when you are talking about all of NSF and billions of dollars, my perception of us “shaking coins out of the NSF piggy bank” was only about 5% of what goes on.
The most impressive thing shared in that session (truly, it was hard to keep up with all the foreign acronyms) was that in Fall 2014, NSF had gone a cash system that was truly “real time,” or in manufacturing lingo, “just in time”. What does this mean? It meant that NSF (and the federal government) wanted all the thousands of awardees to draw down cash in real time. It does not want to be a “bank”. Typically, colleges and universities invoice NSF on a regular basis – quarterly, monthly, etc., but daily, or weekly would have been thought to be too often. The advantage of “real time” is that NSF gets to know better what money is where. The goal is for all colleges to perpetually be in the theoretically happy state of being “owed” no money from NSF during award periods. I was thinking that it might be like a “debit” card rather than a “credit card”. You swipe it and the money is gone from NSF instantly. No more collecting invoices for a period of time, aggregating them, and then submitting a request to NSF. The concept is a bit mind boggling for our own grant and gave me a bit of a headache thinking about a lot of grants taking money out of the NSF “bank” simultaneously, 24/7 for everything including “payroll” with all its burden to miscellaneous transactions typically done with petty cash.
Welcome to the May issue of the FLATE Focus, our blog newsletter where we share our work, announce events we
are involved in, and highlight great programs and people across the state who are working hard to enhance and grow manufacturing education in the state. For the past few years, we have used the May issue of the Focus to celebrate and promote women in Manufacturing. No matter how you slice and dice the data, there remains a significant gap between the number of women vs. men across all aspects of many manufacturing companies. The story in Florida mirrors the national picture. Where are the girls in manufacturing?
Of course, there are the historical, societal reasons and analyzing them is important to develop strategies that can be successfully implemented. Before delving into the ‘why,’ we have to answer two questions. How do we get them into manufacturing? And, how do we keep them there? We sometimes think we know what to do, or know what can attract and retain women in these fields, but it’s good to get these perspectives from experts who can help pinpoint solutions.
A 2015 report, “Solving the Equation,” the Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing, published by the American Association of University Women (https://aauw.org/) finds that “women are making significant contributions to the fields of engineering and computing, yet are still a distinct minority in these fields”. Furthermore, the report concludes that “stereotypes and biases lie at the core of the challenges facing women in engineering and computing.” Educational and workplace environments are therefore dissuading women who might otherwise succeed in these fields. Increasing the number of women in engineering and computing will require focused attention by employers, educational institutions, policy makers and individuals to create welcoming work environments for women.
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