Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Companies, schools partner for training
SPRINGDALE — Northwest Arkansas industries need people who can fix and maintain increasingly complex machinery, and they’re partnering with Northwest Arkansas schools to get them.
Pilgrim’s Pride and Cargill have sent a few dozen workers through a year-old industrial maintenance apprentice training program at Northwest Technical Institute’s Business and Industry Training Center. Eight people who will take their new skills to Cargill’s meat processing complex in Springdale completed the program Friday after a month of six- day, 55-hour weeks at the center.
Several of the new apprentices joked they lived at the center and subsisted on coffee and Little Debbie snacks, but they looked forward to a serious pay-off: A hefty raise and chances for advancement in a line of work that’s in high demand in a heavily automated industry.
“It’s a future,” said Jose Perez, who’s worked at Cargill in various roles for a decade. “Machines are replacing people, so someone’s got to take care of the machine.”
For years area businesses and schools have partnered to try to meet the relentless demand for technicians and specialists in construction, manufacturing and other fields in a rapidly growing region. Jobs like these can get short shrift in a society that values bachelor’s degrees, industry officials often say, but they can offer respectable pay in less time and with less student debt.
“The need for skilled maintenance is at an all-time high,” said Shane Acosta, general manager for the Cargill plant, pointing to conveyor belt motors, high-speed packaging machines and control panels. The company paid the apprentices during the month-long course and covered tuition.
Proof for Acosta’s point isn’t hard to find. Multiple manufacturers a couple years ago covered half the $2.4 million pricetag of the Career Academy of Siloam Springs, for example, which offers a pre-apprenticeship course for high school juniors and seniors in industrial maintenance.
Tyson Foods recruiters at a workforce conference
last week in Springdale announced the company got federal approval for a nationwide maintenance apprenticeship program in partnership with schools close to the company’s plants.
The program could come to Arkansas plants in the coming months.
“We know we’re getting what we’re looking for,” Tim Klinedinst, a senior technical recruiter at Tyson, said in an interview, adding the program will be open to people who don’t yet work for Tyson and to veterans using the G.I. Bill. “I anticipate it to spread very quickly.”
The Business and Industry Training Center is itself the product of public-private partnership. Glad Manufacturing, Tyson, Ozark Regional Transit and two dozen other companies support the center together with Northwest Technical Institute’s foundation. Member companies send workers there for training in electronics, hydraulics and the like, and the center opened to the public two years ago, said Tom Freking, director for the institute’s economic and workforce development.
The month-long intensive program started last year in partnership with the Serrano Group, a human relations and training firm and one of the center’s members. Serrano vets the applicants and provides instruction in leadership and other work skills, while foundation instructors teach how to wire, troubleshoot and repair machines.
“Us older people who are dying off or retiring, we don’t have suitable replacements,” said Marty Cloud, lead instructor at the center.
To create the next generation of maintenance technicians, he and other instructors use increasingly complicated control panels that are studded with sockets for wires, switches and other components and can be configured to simulate countless machines and problems. New graduates called the program intense and hands-on. They quickly pointed out they hadn’t set anything on fire.
Dan Serrano, Serrano Group’s founder, said companies have been completely satisfied with apprentices from the program. Acosta said it provides the base knowledge needed to train the workers on Cargill’s specific machinery, adding the Serrano program works better than trying to train beginners in a busy plant where other needs pop up constantly.
“Their total focus is training; there’s no distractions, so to speak,” Acosta said.