Career Expo a Hit with Connnecticut Youth, Manufacturers
Manufacture Your Future draws thousands from around the state
CBIA writer/editor
[June 2008] Over three days, almost 30 manufacturers from around the state met with thousands of students all under one roof. Their mission? To get a new generation interested in manufacturing careers. Manufacture Your Future, a career expo designed to attract young people to manufacturing, was held June 3–5, 2008, at the Connecticut Expo Center in Hartford. The expo drew close to 3,000 middle- and high-school students as well as hundreds of teachers.
One of the most critical issues facing Connecticut industry is a shortage of skilled workers, says Mary deManbey, program manager for the CBIA Education Foundation, which organized the event. “The average age of a manufacturing employee in our state is 47, and a significant share of the workforce is preparing to retire,” deManbey says. “Who will take over? Who’s going to help Connecticut’s companies innovate and compete?”
MySpace generation meets next-generation manufacturing
Those were the questions on the minds of expo exhibitors and sponsors, which included large, small and midsize manufacturers from every corner of the state.
“We want young people to see the excitement that exists in manufacturing,” says Pat Hayden, vice president of operations at Naugatuck-based metal finisher Donham Craft. “Manufacturing offers good jobs, with good benefits and wages, and a clean work environment.”
To reinforce that image, Manufacture Your Future replicated a contemporary manufacturing environment: clean, safe, climate-controlled and equipped with state-of-the-art tools and machines. Students took a walking tour of a simulated factory floor divided into “pods,” where they could watch live machine and tool demonstrations, ask questions, and get to know some of Connecticut’s top employers. Pods featured CNC programming and machining, CAD/CAM, wire/spring coiling and metal stamping, electroplating, laser cutting, and injection molding.
The expo also included faculty workshops on rapid prototyping, nanotechnology and professional skill-building; informational booths featuring Connecticut manufacturers and educators; robotics, 3-D animation, fuel-cell car and police squad car displays and demonstrations; and judging for the Yankee Ingenuity Award, which awards scholarships to technical high school students for product design and development.
Twenty-first-century workforce
Modern manufacturing is lean, sophisticated, innovative and exciting, says Dr. Karen Wosczyna-Birch. Birch is executive director of the Connecticut Community Colleges’ Regional Center for Next Generation Manufacturing (RCNGM), a resource for manufacturing and technology education and CBIA’s partner in producing the expo.
“What’s missing,” she says, “is a young, skilled workforce—people with the right idea about manufacturing and the right education and motivation to succeed. I believe Manufacture Your Future has gone a long way toward meeting that need.”
