ANGOLA — Matt Conrad and the members of the Indiana Automotive Council that he directs were expecting several more students at Trine University to regard their industry as one that rewards talent and is worth considering for a career.
With help from Trine’s engineering dean, V.K. Sharma, and its Career Services department, the council arranged an Oct. 10 event at the university, during which it could make its case while showing off some late-model vehicles made in Indiana.
Up to 300 students were expected to attend a panel discussion where they could get an insider view of what is exciting about working in the auto industry and visit booths where they could drop off résumés and discuss opportunities for internships, cooperative education and full-time employment with representatives of plants operated by Subaru in Lafayette, Honda in Greensburg, Mursix in Muncie and Chrysler in Kokomo.
“The automotive industry here in Indiana is doing well and they have jobs and they are looking for talent, so … they’re going around to different universities to promote that message, that the automotive industry is a great one to start your career in,” said Terry Johnson, a Career Services associate director.
Trine was the first stop for a road show the council put together as it prepared to roll out a strategic plan to grow the auto industry.
The plan was published Oct. 1 by the council and Conexus Indiana, the state’s advanced-manufacturing and logistics initiative. An announcement unveiling the plan said Indiana already is the nation’s second-largest vehicle manufacturing state.
The announcement said more than 600 companies connected with vehicle manufacturing in the state have an output of nearly $9 billion and employ more than 120,000 of its residents.
Economic-development officials and auto-industry leaders who worked on the plan are out to leverage the state’s leading position in the industry and do even more vehicle manufacturing in Indiana by making it more competitive.
Part of the plan calls for addressing gaps in Indiana’s automotive supply chain, such as the capacity of its forging and casting and metal-plating and electro-coating resources for suppliers who need to outsource that work.
Collecting information on the demand for those capabilities and sharing it with companies that do that kind of work could encourage expansion of those resources in the state or help attract those resources to the state, Conrad said.
The plan is getting a warm reception among economic-development groups and the agencies that work with them in northeast Indiana. They consider it important to support growth of the auto industry because it pays well and provides a lot of employment in the region.
“Region 3 has a significant concentration of our advanced-manufacturing sector engaged it automotive manufacturing,” said Kathleen Randolph, president and chief executive officer for Northeast Indiana Regional Workforce Investment Board and the region’s work-force liaison to Conexus.
“This sector is incredibly important to the strength of our regional economy and the Northeast Indiana Workforce Investment Board is pouring resources into education and skills training for employees already working in the sector as well as preparing emerging workers to ready themselves for employment in this sector.”
Conrad said the auto industry provides 19.2 percent of manufacturing employment in northeast Indiana compared with 6.5 percent nationally. “It is essentially three times the national average, which makes it a very important industry for northeast Indiana,” he said.
Indiana Economic Development Corp. officials and auto-industry managers, including some from northeast Indiana, contributed to the development of the strategic plan to improve the industry’s innovation, work-force capabilities and supply chain.
Some northeast Indiana employers in the automotive sector have encountered skill shortages when they sought to hire more qualified workers, and the strategic plan is designed to help change that by leveraging existing training programs and developing additional training programs where they are needed.
Among the employers that have run up against the problem is Busche Enterprise Division, an Albion-based computer numerical control production machining firm serving customers including original equipment manufacturers in the auto industry.
Many of the things students used to learn in shop or vocational education classes in high school “they don’t teach anymore today,” said Nick Busche, president and CEO of Busche Enterprise Division.
“We could not get the basic caliber of employee we needed, so we had to implement this training program to get the basics into them,” he said.
The company’s training program started in 2005 teaches everything from precision measurement and metric conversion to CNC lathe and mill operation, and its success prompted the council to recruit Busche to work on the strategic plan.
The plan includes a push to increase awareness at all education levels of the advantages of a manufacturing career. Busche said he looks forward to getting that message out to students because “not all of them have an opportunity to go to college, and if they do go to college they have all that debt.”
Manufacturing facilities “are not sweatshops; they’re all clean environments, they’re air conditioned,” he said, adding that the work “requires a big skill base that pays very well. They have a skill they can use anywhere in this country, and they have no debt.”
The council is encouraging its members to establish and strengthen ties with schools in their areas and support existing programs.
Conrad said the biggest skills shortage faced by Indiana’s auto industry is in the industrial-maintenance field. Workers with industrial-maintenance expertise keep all the robots and automated production equipment running, which the work force uses to put out a plant’s products.
This spring, Wells County Economic Development brought nine manufacturers in the county together with WorkOne, Norwell High School and Ivy Tech Corporate College to develop an industrial-maintenance technician skills training program.
The WorkOne-funded employee training is being provided at Norwell High School by Corporate College teachers, who have been covering topics such as electricity, fluid power, machining, motors, welding and programmable logic controllers.
About 10 employees selected by the manufacturers will complete the training in a couple of weeks. The manufacturers included two auto-industry suppliers — Buckhorn and Metaldyne Corp. — and officials who helped develop the training program believe it could be modified for the auto industry without difficulty.
“We went with Ivy Tech and talked with each of the companies and said, ‘Here are all the things we could teach, and you, as an employer, choose what you want.’ So we kind of custom built that program,” said Gary Gatman, vice president for strategic initiatives at WorkOne. “They would just need to be able to sit with us and tell us what they need for an automotive curriculum.”
A similar program started last month for manufacturers in Adams County and “we will be replicating this in other counties in the region,” he said.
Gatman said a training program of this type could be developed to help address any other skill shortages faced by auto-industry suppliers. A similar program that focuses on automotive components machining started in Noble County last month.
“This program can be adjusted for whatever application you’re looking for,” said Tim Ehlerding, WCED director. “This would be a perfect program for the industrial maintenance skills in the automotive sector.
The automotive sector is among six industry clusters the region is trying to grow and is an important part of its economic-development efforts, he said. “I would highly recommend every community have something like this because the need is there.”