The Apprenticeship Model That Could Transform Manufacturing with PJ McGrew

Welcome And Guest Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Automation Ladies, the only podcast we know of where girls talk about industrial automation.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

With one of your hosts, Ali Gilbin. My update, real quick, is that I'm still working on OT SkateCon, which is in 55 days. But today I'm here with uh PJ McGrew, and he's gonna talk to us about a strategy for workforce development that is sometimes overlooked or often overlooked. But before that, um, PJ, can you give us a a little overview of you know who you are, how you got where you are, and then we could talk about workforce development.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Certainly. Yeah, thanks, Ali. Uh, really appreciate being here in the time. Uh so yeah, my uh career journey is uh a long and winding one, and I had no idea that I would end up uh where I am today. Uh so I was I was a college dropout. Uh yeah, back then I had I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, decided that's not what I wanted to do, uh, dropped out. Fortunately, I had invested wisely in the stock market as a young high school kid, uh, taking half my paycheck when I was working, pushing cards at Walmart and invested that. And so when I dropped out, I stupidly took all that out, bummed around for a few years, started substitute teaching, and decided that's what I really loved. Uh so uh and I was encouraged by my fiance at the time to go back to school, um, finished up, started teaching. I taught for about 10 years, both in Idaho and in Indiana, and then had an opportunity to leave the classroom, thought that uh I could have a broader impact on students across Indiana than just, or across the country, I guess, at that point in time, than just the ones that I was teaching on a day in, day out basis. And I went to work for an assessment company and did that for a few years, started my own assessment company with a couple of my uh co-workers there. And then somehow I ended up working for the state of state government uh in Indiana for the uh state board of education. I was asked to testify on behalf of some alternate route teaching licenses. I I never took an education class before I became a teacher. I was a math and philosophy major. Um, and my wife's family was from Idaho, and so when we moved out there, they had a program that would allow me to take a pedagogy test, take a content area test, and get my teaching license. And so Indiana was going to do something similar. So I went before the State Board of Ed and testified. And I before I dropped out, I had met one of the uh general counsel members at the uh State Board of Ed, or I guess the general counsel for the state board of ed. And she asked if I what I was doing and if I'd ever be interested in working for the state. So I did uh and then turned that into an eight-year career at the state working in education, workforce development, and ran the governor's workforce cabinet for four years before taking a break from the education and workforce space. Just did some government affairs work for a local nonprofit here in Indy. And then about a year and a half ago, this opportunity at Connexus, Indiana arrived. Uh, they were looking for uh senior vice president of talent strategy and programming. And I think once you get into that education and workforce space, you always kind of have that bug. And so I was itching to get back into it and so jumped in. Uh, I was worried. I didn't have any manufacturing experience in Connexus, Indiana. We are uh uh advanced manufacturing and logistics association that brings together both employers, the public sector, and uh the education system to be able to design solutions around manufacturing logistics needs. Our uh COO said, hey, look, our employers will tell us everything you need to know about manufacturing, but you know enough about the education workforce space, you won't have any problem doing this job. And it's been uh an exciting time, I think, the last year and a half on what we've built and where we're going.

The Swiss Model And Indiana’s Start

SPEAKER_01 3:52

That's great. So I I've heard I read about the uh the Swiss model for apprenticeships. Can you tell me about what that is?

SPEAKER_02 4:01

Yeah, so uh the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation here in Indianapolis uh really started embarked upon this journey dating back, I think initially into 2018. I was working for the governor's workforce cabinet at the time. Uh local education entity uh from up in northern Indiana was wanting to take a trip over to Germany, one of their um automotive manufacturers up there, Bentler Automotive. Uh their headquarters was in Germany. They do apprenticeship style there in Germany as well. And and Claire Fidian Green, who's the president of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, had been doing a lot of research on Switzerland. And so she helped fund that initial trip over there. We spent, I think, three or four days in Germany and a couple of days in Switzerland seeing their high school apprenticeship model in action. And uh, we came back, did some policy work uh to be able to enable that type of activity. And then in 2020, uh with the support of Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, the Modern Apprenticeship Program launched a pilot uh in central Indiana and then expanded out, spent the next couple of years expanding that out to where, you know, I think they were operating at nine different locations around the state. Back then, it really was uh a local intermediary bringing together employers and the educators to design kind of employer-specific training plans. And, you know, I think in 2023, uh the Richard and Fairbanks Foundation was looking at it, trying to figure out why we couldn't scale. Well, when you're designing these very specific uh employer training plans, the education system doesn't handle that very well, right? We have kind of like standards for classes and all of those things. And so uh iLab Indiana was formed and they took a trip over to Switzerland and participated in the CMETS Institute over there and said, Well, your problem is you do not have industry talent associations coordinating with employers around uh an occupational standard. So uh they began taking employer delegations over in Switzerland over to Switzerland and in June of 2024, a group of about 30 manufacturing employees took a trip over there, saw the Swiss apprenticeship model in action, came back, the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation asked, you know, who in Indiana could help coordinate that work. And the employer said connexus, Indiana. Um, and so they had posted that job position that I eventually ended up taking uh to help coordinate that activity. And so since I joined in December of 2024, um, really I'd been out of the education game for a couple of years, so trying to catch up on what had been done with the pilot since I had left state government. Uh, Indiana had just approved new diploma requirements in December of 2024. So trying to understand what that meant and how that could enable that activity. Uh, and so really those new diploma requirements are all about trying to get high school students some work-based learning or project-based learning experience while they're in high school so that when they graduate, they really do have the applied skills to be able to do uh the things that they were learning in the theory of in the classroom, but weren't really putting it into practice. And so uh it's it's just really a really exciting time to be in the education workforce space here, uh, a lot of momentum around trying to get students those opportunities. And, you know, the employers here have are are really starting to buy in to the fact that uh they can have more influence on what is happening in the education space than what they had before through that industry talent association if we leverage it in the right way. So a lot of the work that we're doing now, right? It's been a year since I brought our employers together for the first time. Uh in April 28th, 2025, I brought together about 20 employers and just sat down and we said, okay, how are we going to design and build out uh an educational program that fits your needs? Uh we had employers of all shapes, sizes representing every subsector of manufacturing in Indiana. Uh, I think everywhere from a 90-person shop to, you know, we have Cummins and Caterpillar and all of those bigger employers around the table as well, Toyota. Um, and uh it really was amazing to see them come together and start to discuss common needs that they all had as we started to build this

Designing The Three-Year Pathway

SPEAKER_02 8:41

out.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

So is that a two-year program or a four-year program? How does it look like so?

SPEAKER_02 8:47

This this initial program that we've built out is a three-year program. Uh, because of you know, DOL, hazardous occupation laws, working with teenagers and all of those things. Our our program is meant to start uh their a student's junior year. So when they turn 16 and they can do a little bit more than what they could if they were hired at 15, uh, and then progress along their junior, senior year, and then what would be their their you know first year of post-secondary essentially. What we've built doesn't necessarily have to be done via apprenticeship, right? We are taking the occupational standard that we've built right now, and we are designing six brand new high school career and technical education courses so that it could scale to more than just those apprentices, right? So our thought process was you know, every student that's participating in a manufacturing program should be uh learning content designed by employers for what they need. And so we need to be updating the educational standards uh around those needs as well. So um, so yeah, so regardless if we have an employer that just wants to offer uh a high school apprenticeship, that's great and good for them and good for the student. There's gonna be way more ROI uh by hiring apprentice and getting them where they need to be to be productive for you in that over that three-year period. But, you know, if you're a little skeptical of that, you just want to offer maybe uh a project uh to the school based upon some need that you have within your facility. We can facilitate those types of conversations as well. Uh, but you know, we've looked at what our employers have told us they need and what we are currently offering. So we have 10 different manufacturing, career, and technical education pathways in Indiana right now. And that's way, way too many. Uh, schools don't know what to offer, students don't know what to enroll in. Um, and so I think what we've built, we can consolidate those pathways from 10 uh at least down to five, uh, because 80% of the educational content in those five pathways is within those six courses that our our employers have helped us build out now.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

Tell me more about uh location. You're in Indiana, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:04

Yes, that's correct.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

And so this program is in Indiana. How many students do you have uh participating in this? Or you do have have you started putting students in this?

SPEAKER_02 11:14

Uh we will start next school year. So we just uh ratified our occupational standard at our April meeting. Uh took us, I was a staff of one for about a year um doing this work. And so it took me about a year to figure out how we could design and build this out. Um, listening to those the employers going through all the KSAs uh that they wanted and then packaging them in ways that made sense, right? So with my um curriculum and assessment design backgrounds, I could listen to the employers around what they want, what they need, and then figure out how to package those things together. So we will launch our a pilot next year. Uh, I think we have eight of our employers that are part of our 24 member steering committee that are going to offer apprenticeship slots next year. I think we'll have between 10 and 15 uh apprentices next year. And then 27-28 is when we're really hoping to scale. So the the six brand new uh career in tech ed courses that we're building out right now, we will launch in 27-28. And so through enrollments in those classes, we'll be able to deliver the content that the employers want to students, as well as you know, any of the employers that want to offer an apprenticeship, we'll be able to connect them in and know that the students will be learning the same content that they have already signed off on.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

That's great.

Adults, Career Changers, And Ivy Tech

SPEAKER_01 12:37

What about if you're not 16 years old? Is there is there a way to get into the program if you're older?

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Yeah, so that there's there are certainly ways to get into the program if you're older. And that's one of one of the nice things about what we've built is it doesn't have to be just within the high school space. So we are actively partnering with post-secondary institutions across Indiana as well, providing them feedback on what we're hearing from employers, and that's kind of forcing them to also rethink some of the things that they have done or have built already from their degree programs, short-term programs, and all of those things in between. Uh, we are currently working with IBTech Community College. It's the largest singly accredited community college system in the country. And uh working with them on some short course development, you know, we know for incumbent workers or career changers that have families at home, they don't have time necessarily to sit in an associate degree, two-year program, or maybe even a semester-long program. So, how do we start to condense some of the learning that we could give provide for them to transition to manufacturing in these shorter, quicker, bite-sized chunks? Um, and so just last week we uh brought together a group of about 20 employers with Ivy Tech on uh two different 30-hour courses that we built around manufacturing principals classes designed for career changers or high school graduates that you know never participated in manufacturing. So we're doing those things as well. And then the uh the polymechanic or advanced manufacturing technician occupational standard that we've built, uh, talking with Ivy Tech about some of their degree programs and how they too, just like we're looking at the high school space, consolidating pathways down, how could they consolidate some of their degrees around some of those same principles and concepts that employers have outlined? Getting a little bit broader from a foundational perspective at the very beginning and onset of a student's journey, whether that's a high school student or uh an adult that's just going to uh a community college for the first time, and then letting them kind of specialize from there. So we've developed this kind of we're calling it the core 14, uh, simply because it's a decent play on words here in Indiana, because we used to have the core 40 diploma. Um, so it's kind of aligned to some things that that folks already know here. But those kind of the 14 modules that we've built out here provide a really good, strong foundational base uh for modern manufacturing, uh covering everything from uh really a it's a cross-functional technician, essentially. So learning about CNC, learning about automation robotics, PLCs, you know, all of those things as your foundational core, and then letting students decide whether, hey, do I want to be a maintenance tech or do I want to be a CNC machinist? Uh, do I want to go into quality and design after they have that foundation rather than the way that you know we typically design educational pathways uh in a siloed manner around a specific occupation. Uh for instance, our current precision machining program starts students off with precision machining. It doesn't give them any understanding of what manufacturing is or what a manufacturing environment looks like, how that role, their specific role in manufacturing could uh you know impact the entire company. And so um I we're really excited about this. I think just knowing and hearing from the employers that this uh this is what they're looking for, um, and then being able to to inject that in the education system.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Awesome.

Selling Manufacturing And Flipping The Script

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Uh, what do you find the most rewarding about working in education?

SPEAKER_02 16:30

Really the the student impact, right? I mean, I still miss the classroom. Uh I'll I'll go visit classrooms, be like, gosh, I really miss teaching. Um so seeing that light bulb come on for the students when they actually connect learning with things that they're passionate about. Uh that's probably what gets me most excited. I think most exciting about this work is figuring out, you know, how what employers want and what they need to in their manufacturing environments and how that can translate back into the classroom for students in ways that we're not currently providing. Um, so being able to have that impact uh that I think will better prepare students to where they don't have to be retrained now when they first go into uh a manufacturing facility. They they have the skills they need and they can be productive right away. Uh so I think from a from a student, an employer, and a broader Indiana economic impact perspective, um, that's I think what really excites me about the work.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

So if you're a manufacturer, what can what do you have to say to them to uh I guess kind of nudge them in the direction of using high school students?

SPEAKER_02 17:43

Yeah, that that is a question that comes up quite a bit. I I think it's it's really about your your pipeline development and where you can find people. Um we have to do a better job of creating early awareness about manufacturing just generally, right? Manufacturing is not, you know, I think when I when I was a kid growing up, my parents were like, you're you're gonna go to college, you're gonna have, you know, a white-collar job and all of those things because my my dad my dad was an electrician, my grandpa was a mason, and you know, they didn't want us to have to do manual labor and all of those things. But uh manufacturing isn't what it was, I think, you know, when my my dad first started working or my grandpa first started working, right? It's um you go into these facilities, they're clean, there's robots everywhere. And I think, you know, once students kind of see that and how tech enabled a lot of it is, I think that can excite students. Uh, but I just don't know that they recognize what oftentimes is right in their backyard. Um, and so trying to convince employers to open up their facilities to have students and their families come in, see what it's about, um, and just starting small, starting where you can, right? You might only be able to partner with your school um and come in and give a presentation to a CTE class, or you might be able to offer an internshiping opportunity, or uh maybe you're ready to jump right into an apprenticeship, but let's start small, let's start with one or two uh and then grow from there because it is going to take a lot more work uh than what you might think it would at the very beginning. But then once you get a process up and running, um then you can really scale from there. I think it it takes uh you know a champion probably at the C-suite level to say, hey, this is something that we're going to get on board with. But then it also takes, you know, a willing supervisor who might not have worked with a 16 or 17-year-old kid before, might not understand this generation of students. Uh so we're going through and we're developing some supervisor training to make sure that they have those skills to do that. But then you also need to mentor that student through the process. And that mentor could be the same person as the supervisor, or maybe somebody uh that's just working alongside them that might have a passion for youth development. Um, so there are all of these steps that you have to take to be able to do that. Um and we are slowly but surely, I think, getting more and more employers on board with that. Um, I think especially because, you know, one thing, our population isn't necessarily growing in Indiana. It's it's been pretty stagnant. One and two, when you look at uh the current uh manufacturing workforce in Indiana, over 25% of those individuals are 55 or older. So we are really going to have to think about new ways of bringing folks into facilities. And one of those is, hey, let's start younger with high school students and let's kind of let's flip the model a little bit, right? I mean, we've in America for for a long time now. It's, you know, you go through high school, you go through college, and then you get a job. I think one of the nice things that I've seen over in Switzerland, so I've had the uh opportunity to go over there three times now, and you know, they start apprenticeship, they start working, about 67% of their students start uh in high school with an apprenticeship opportunity. They figure out what they want to do, they uh, you know, get locked in with an employer, and then that employer, based upon how the students performed and what their needs are, they'll they'll send that student back to post-secondary. So, you know, over two-thirds of those students that start an apprenticeship end up back in secondary or po uh end up in post-secondary, but it's just it's a little bit different mindset than what we think about over here. Here it's school first and then work, and there it's school integrated with work and then some additional schooling on top of that.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

I'm a millennial, and growing up, I was told you know, you you don't want to go, you don't want to go to trade school, you need to go to college. And I think that that, you know, that had to do with you know the skills gap that we have today. Um Large percentage of the people in manufacturing are 55 or older. Do you think we're finally changing that? And you know, where do you change that? I guess high school students and showing high school students is where you start to show people that that's not true and that they can make a good living in trades. And now it's almost like there's a hybrid. It's a hybrid of a trades job and a you need to be educated job. You know, I'm a controls engineer myself, and I had to learn a lot of you know, getting my own tools. And that's not something that college was gonna teach me. They taught me engineering principles, and so when I was out in school, I was I felt useless for the first couple of years, even because all I learned was theory and nothing that I had, you know, all the experience that I have today and that makes me, you know, worth the amount of money that I'm worth is because of the experience and actually putting my hands on stuff in the industry, not the not all of the, you know, all the college that I took. Uh when we were all told it to take college, but you know, now we have this giant skills gap. Do you think that that attitude is finally changing?

SPEAKER_02 23:08

I do. I I think it is changing, and I and I think that it's it's really, you know how we how we define a good job, right? And I and I think for a long time, right, and I think you know, I've already talked about my parents, I think they were somewhat guilty of this too, right? All of my siblings, they pushed to, you know, traditional four-year post-secondary. And uh because they felt like hey, if you have a college degree, that automatically equates to a good job. I think we understand nowadays that's not necessarily the case, and there are multiple paths to a good job. And, you know, for something like manufacturing, and unless you are pairing the theoretical with the applied, and whether that's a lab, simulated lab environment or through actual structured OJT, you're not going to necessarily have all the skills that you need when you go to work on day one, right? And so we it's this blurring of the lines between the you know traditional classroom theoretical approach and applying those skills in a real way before while while you're in somewhat of a safe environment before you actually start your job, your full-time job after you finish school.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

What can you say to uh high school students if you're trying to sell them manufacturing?

SPEAKER_02 24:25

Uh, I think it's about the opportunity, right? And I I I won't forget this probably ever. Uh, from our very first meeting in April of last year with our employers, I I assumed that uh because production roles are high need all of the time. I I thought that was where our employers would automatically jump to and what they wanted to look at when we built out this first occupational standard. And and one of our employers, he said, you know, PJ, we don't want to train high school students for a particular job in manufacturing. We need them to understand that you can build a career in manufacturing. And I think we have to do much more of that, right? Show them that career progression that you can have in manufacturing, that it'll lead to really good economic opportunity for your family. Um, and you know, there's always gonna be a job in in manufacturing. I know uh even with, you know, as more we become more tech enabled and automation becomes in increases across facilities, jobs are gonna change, right? And your job, you know, yeah, that production job might get a little bit easier, uh, but the jobs are still going to be there. Um, they just might look different than they do today or they did yesterday. And so um I I think we have to do a better job. I think it's one of the things that we have on our agenda for the over the next year is what what does that look like? Whether it's you know more K-8 awareness just around STEM and giving students projects uh uh uh uh focused on specific roles or jobs um so that they can you know learn about more of those things, uh, getting folks into classrooms, right? Just earlier this month, we honored our we had our rising 30 um celebration. So we have employers all around the state nominate folks that are 30 or under, that are you know making a huge impact um within their manufacturing environment. So, how do we leverage those rising 30 students to be able to go out and talk to high school students about careers in manufacturing so they can see, hey, look, even as a young person here, I'm having this type of impact uh within my facility. Uh so we have to we have to scale that, we have to create more awareness. We only had last year about 4% of our career and technical education enrollments in a manufacturing pathway. And when that when manufacturing and logistics account for 35% of Indiana's workforce, that that pipeline just isn't there, right? And so I think we have to show young people that you can have a meaningful career in manufacturing, right? There's advancement opportunities, economic mobility, and it's becoming increasingly tech enabled, which I think it excites young people as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

If you're a uh manufacturer, how do you even start? Let's say you're not Indiana and you don't necessarily you can't necessarily come to you. How do you how would you recommend uh you know, would would do they need to go to like the colleges and start working that way?

SPEAKER_02 27:36

That that could be one approach, you know. I I would maybe probably start with your manufacturing association, uh, you know, your your statewide association and say, hey, look, let's let's flip the script, right? Because right now, the way that you know educational pathways are traditionally built, right? You have a post-secondary, you know, say community college system that they will look at, you know, job postings, data, lagging labor market informational data, and start to build out pathways really around bad data, right? And bad information. We know employers don't traditionally always update job postings to demonstrate what skills they need, especially with some of these tech-enabled roles. Uh, we just met with a group of employers last week, like, well, we haven't updated those job descriptions in 10 or 15 years. Does anybody even look at those? It's like, well, yes, some of your community colleges will use those to build out programs. And so flip the script, bring in instead of the education system designing programs, bring together a group of employers, identify their common needs, build out a pathway, and then try to revise and reform the education system around what the employer has built. And that's I think where and so going back six years now at this point, where I really kind of messed up. I don't know that I messed up, I think it was needed at the time. Uh, so I was I was running the governor's workforce cabinet, which was our state workforce board, and I was also the state CTE director here in Indiana. Our high school CTE uh oversight was at our Department of Education. Our post-secondary career in tech ed oversight was at our Department of Workforce Development. Two entities that had a hard time talking together. Um, and they were they were kind of disconnected. And so I said, look, we're gonna bring those underneath one roof. Um, we're gonna put them here at the workforce cabinet, we're gonna redesign this system. And we had had um kind of a certificate program, workforce ready grant program that Governor Holcomb had instituted where we would pay for one year of uh of post-secondary for folks, get them their one-year certificate, they could go on and get a job or they could continue on to finish out their degree if they wanted to. And we backward built from those one-year programs that we looked at wage data, we looked at um uh occupational demand data, and then decided what we were going to fund there. So we took those programs and we just backward built them into the high school space. Uh, because at the time we had something like our introduction to welding class mapped to nine different post-secondary classes at one community college. I said, how can one class map to nine different classes? It doesn't make any sense. So uh so we backward built, so now our high school programs are essentially the first year of post-secondary. But because there were so many of those things that we were funding, right, that's what led us to having 70 different high school, career, and technical education pathways across all of our industry sectors. And that's just way too many uh for schools, for employers. And so now I think this model where we're not just listening to education on what they've built, but we're really listening to employers around their needs and what they want built is a much better model. Um, and we're able to get, you know, I think new skills that are coming around uh much injected into the system much quicker than the typical approach to, you know, standard development, and at least in the K-12 realm here in Indiana, uh, those standards hadn't been looked at in over 10 years before I redesigned the next level programs of study in 2020.

Digital Skills, AI, And Adoption Barriers

SPEAKER_01 31:18

Are you doing anything with uh programs that include AI?

SPEAKER_02 31:24

So, yeah, that is that is a topic, as you know, it comes up in just about every conversation every day. Um, and so one of one of the nice things, uh, you know, so we started when we started down this journey of looking at building out the the polymechanic pathway that we now have. We started with what Switzerland had already developed, right? So our group of employers had gone over there, they'd seen it in action, and they said, look, they have this cross-functional technician, this is where we really want to start. So we took their training plan, I put it in front of the employers, I said, okay, evaluate these knowledge, skills, and abilities that they've identified. Tell me what works in our context here in Indiana, what doesn't, what gaps exist, and all of those things. And the consistent message that we heard really, we began this work, I think it was in late May, early June of last year, and ran through December, uh, was that there just weren't enough digital skills being built out within the KSAs that Switzerland was using. And it made a lot of sense because the polymechanic uh training plan that we were looking at was built and designed in 2015 and 2016. And there's been a lot of technological change, you know, in the last 10 years. And so we have this digital skills thread that cuts across all of our modules that we now have built out within this polymechanic pathway to account for that. I wouldn't say we've necessarily focus on AI specifically within that. It is a component. Um, but you know, one of the things that we've been hearing from employers recently around, you know, wanting to utilize AI for you know some of their frontline workers and some other things is that they don't necessarily have the language skills to be able to interact with AI and write good prompts and all of those things. And so we're actually talking with Ivy Tech right now about the potential to, you know, do we need uh an ELA remedial course paired with some prompt writing uh to be able to get out there? One of those short course, you know, does it even need to be 30 hours? Could it be a little bit shorter than that even? Um so we're hoping to dig in on that a little bit more um and maybe be able to launch something there in the within the next but by the end of this year. But I I will say AI is one of our, well, I'll say digital adoption is one of our big key focus areas that connects us. So we have two two main pillars that we focus on to help the AML industry. One is uh obviously talent and workforce, uh, and the other one is overcoming barriers to digital adoption. And so just this year we've launched our our digital adoption barrier workshop series. We just had our second workshop last week where we had, I think it was about 75 employers attend, just working with them on overcoming some of those barriers. You know, uh how do you how do you convince your C-suite to to make that investment? You know, who owns that? How do you you start and then create a sustainability plan just to continue to add more and more within your facility? And so that's gone over really well. Uh, and we had been been running a program that the the state is not funding any longer. Uh, but our our manufacturing readiness grant program that uh we launched at the state, I think in 2019, and then Kinexus managed on behalf of the state. Uh we were able to support uh you know about 750 small, mid-sized manufacturers do something in that digital adoption arena. Um, and so we have some really rich data around those projects. And so we're taking those projects now and creating kind of an AI conductor tool uh that would allow manufacturers to search on on projects that have already been funded by the state and just to see the results of those things. Uh, we've done a lot of case studies to highlight uh success stories there as well. And so trying to do more and more uh in that arena where talent and technology kind of merge together.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

You've spent a lot of time talking to manufacturers. Um, what are they looking for that you know isn't necessarily you know there? I guess what's what's the gap that they're looking for in these high school students that you're trying to develop the most?

The Real Skills Employers Want

SPEAKER_02 35:45

Uh, you know, I I think the the couple of things that come up, you know, again and again. Uh, you know, adaptability is one thing uh that comes up, obviously, and it's no surprise to you, like the just the professional skills. Uh, how do we do more of that? Which is one of the reasons why I'm so excited about you know Indiana's new diploma, because one of one of those ways to ensure that students are developing those professional skills is through some type of work experience, and we can get that through work-based learning. Uh, you know, we we only have, I, I believe, and these numbers are going to be a little bit old, so they the percentages might not hold today as they did a couple of years ago. But I think we only had about 10 to 20 percent of students 14 to 18 that were working in Indiana now. And so, you know, 20 years ago, that number was much, much higher. And so the professional skills that were being developed through work um in those those younger students just don't exist today because students aren't working like they used to. And so um, through through work-based learning, project-based learning, I think we can start to develop some of those teamwork skills that employers are looking for, some of those adaptability skills. Um, and then troubleshooting is probably the one that comes up more often than not. And so, really making sure we have in the the courses that we're building out right now um multiple units around troubleshooting for students to be able to make sure that they are learning those skills as well.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

If people are interested in talking to you, how do they uh get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_02 37:21

Uh uh, so there's uh we have we have an uh AML Industry Talent Association webpage on uh on our website. It's got my team and my contact info on there. Uh, there's also a form that they could fill out if they're interested in learning more. Um, folks can always reach out to me uh via email. I've been connecting with some folks all around the country. Uh we start we're starting to see this industry talent association model grow. Um there are a group of other states, probably about 10 states, uh, that are looking at doing something similar to what we're doing in Indiana. I know uh Colorado has stood up uh a manufacturing industry talent association as well. Uh so I've been in communication with the lead there just to share lessons learned over the past year that I think they just launched in December, and so it was really able to provide her with some insights uh to hopefully get them going a little bit faster than what it took me. Um, because I I do think listening to employers, bringing them together, it's it creates a replicable process, right? We, you know, all we might see different skills across states, uh, but I think you know, inevitably a lot of it is going to be the same if we just bring employers together and listen to them. Some so I'm hoping that this this town association model can can scale um to other areas.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

It certainly sounds like it will be able to scale. I'm excited to hear about how it works out.

SPEAKER_02 38:50

Yeah. It's it's it's really then a matter of I I think then convincing the education system that uh they need to change what they're doing a little bit to look to listen to the employers on the front end as they go through the design process, rather than, you know, they'll they'll build something and then get it kind of a tacit uh validation from an advisory board that might have a couple of manufacturers on it, but it also has somebody from the tech industry and somebody from ag, right? Those advisory boards tend to be more cross-sector advisory boards than just looking at a single industry sector. And so uh, but we'll start to see, I think, right, some some overlap and and skills that we see, you know, as technology continues to evolve and impact all the all the sectors that we have. Um, we'll see some more, I think, cross-functional skills to make it easier for people to transition from one job or one industry into to another, right? I think uh tech is is a prime example of that right now, right? I mean, everybody's gonna need AI, and then everybody's gonna be worried about cybersecurity. So as these tech firms might be laying off folks, I think it's a prime opportunity for some of them then to transition over into manufacturing or some of these other sectors that are uh are trying to integrate their facilities more in a tech-enabled way.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

Well, this was a really interesting conversation.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Thank you for listening to Automation Lanies. If you like our content and you want to stay in touch, please connect with us on LinkedIn, follow the show page, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and you can send us a message or a copy on our website. Automation. We look forward to getting another by Samuel James.