Students and employers give workforce center good reviews
CARROLL — There are many schools that students interested in an engineering degree can attend. But Bloom-carroll graduate Abigail Hall chose the engineering program at Fairfield County Workforce Center through Ohio University Lancaster.
“It was attractive to me because you don’t just learn how to make parts on machines,” she said of the center. “You also learn the electronics aspect and hydraulics and a lot of different components. I love it. I love hands-on stuff. That’s how I learn, so this is great for that.”
Hall wants to enter the agricultural engineering field and work with farming equipment, crops and livestock. She said a two-year degree from Ohio University Lancaster would be sufficient for her career choice, but she may also transfer to Ohio State.
County officials on Thursday hosted an open house at the county-owned workforce located at 4465 Coonpath Road NW. The center has been open for a few weeks, but Thursday was the official grand opening. The center is on property formerly used by the county board of developmental disabilities.
The county commission agreed to take over debt from that board and also received $1.2 million from the state to open the center. The county also purchased computer equipment and contracted for services to improve the building and as thus far spent more than $990,000 for the center.
Classes at the center are designed to give students an option of gaining a certificate to begin their career or to continue their education path toward a degree at Hocking College or Ohio University. Areas of focus include carpentry, electrical, HVAC, advanced manufacturing, and nursing.
Trevor Evans is also a Bloom-carroll graduate and was in Hall’s electronics class.
“It’s really fun,” he said. “It definitely grabs my attention for all the aspects of engineering. It’s just really fascinating to me.”
Evans wants to move into aerospace engineering with the hope of designing airplanes and spacecraft. He’s starting at OUL and the workforce center to get a two-year degree and to also get his general education classes taken care of before transferring to Ohio State’s aerospace engineering program.
“I’ve always been a World War II plane junkie,” Evans said. “I’ve always just been interested in planes from that era on both sides of the war. I just want to learn different components to different planes and eventually make my own for better future traveling and to help the military in a way.”
Fairfield County Economic Development Director Rick Szabrak said the idea of the workforce center is to help close the area’s labor shortage that he said is not going away anytime soon.
“If we can generate interest in these careers and provide low-cost options for job seekers to gain the necessary skills for these jobs, we will see manufacturing, construction, and healthcare industries continue to grow in our county,” he said.
Whatever program students are in, they can get classroom and hands-on training as they learn new skills and trades. Claypool Electric has a section in the center to train electrician apprentices. Jesse Mitchell runs the apprentice program for the company, which currently has 87 apprentices in it.
“This is huge,” he said. “We have a larger space to be able to bring more apprentices in. That’s just going to allow our company to grow to where we can start attacking larger projects and be more aggressive in getting some of the larger projects that are coming into the area. The more people we can train and have quality training and produce quality electricians is only going to grow our business with our customers.”