Cultivating local talent for the industrial center in the northwest suburbs was the focus of last week’s business appreciation luncheon that featured Democratic Illinois U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley at Pescatore Palace in Franklin Park.
“There are two things I hear about constantly as a public official from the business community,” Franklin Park Mayor Barrett Pedersen said at the luncheon. “You can guess what number one is: Taxes are too high. But the second one is manufacturers’ challenge in finding skilled workers.”
The average age of the skilled manufacturing worker in Illinois is 54 years old, he said. And as these workers age out of their profession, he said the United States has started to rely on importing skilled manufacturing workers, primarily from Eastern Europe, to fill that professional void.
“If you’ve ever gone into one of the manufacturing plants in Franklin Park, you can see people who are 60, 70, even 80 years old,” Pedersen said. “They love doing their job, and they’re paid a whole lot extra because you can’t find people who are younger to take these jobs.”
According to the Illinois Consortium for Advanced Technical Training, about 83 percent of U.S. manufacturers say they can’t find local skilled workers to fill the current number of open positions they have. By 2025, it’s estimated that there will be 3.4 million skilled manufacturing positions that will need filling.
To address this need, engineering, technology and technical programs at Triton College are partnering with manufacturers to train the next generation of skilled workers. Students in Triton’s program would apprentice at a manufacturing firm for three years while they are in school to develop their technical skills. Once students graduate with a German DIHK certification from the program, they will be guaranteed a specialist position with a manufacturing firm for five years.
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The goal is to cultivate employee loyalty and develop a sustainable pool of talent in the Franklin Park region that those manufacturing firms need. The estimated cost of the program for students is $14,000 for the first year and $12,000 for the second and third. While in the program, apprentice students will be able to make $9 an hour during their first year, $10.50 an hour during their second and $12 an hour during their final year in the program.
During his remarks at the luncheon, Quigley talked about the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2014. The measure is designed to help job seekers access employment, education, training and support services to succeed in the labor market and to match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy.
“This act is going a long way to providing an effective, modern workforce training system,” he said. He said the act is an example of the kind of productive bipartisanship that people don’t often see anymore in Illinois or Washington, D.C.
“With the extremes of both parties, and the polarization that comes with it, [there is] the inability to do more things like this is because it’s safer to be on the extremes than in the middle,” he said.
He went on to say that the act and other type of common-sense measures may not be “sexy” enough to get viewers on CNN, but they are essential for the nation to continue to be an economic leader with first-class infrastructure.
Alex V. Hernandez is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.