L E ADERS
BACK TO SCHOOLS Want to make sure you’ll have the workers you need for the future? Start developing them early. Very, very early. BY DALE BUSS
“The persistent threat to the industry that we have to address is that there’s going to be a shortage of people with advanced manufacturing skills and interest in going to manufacturing companies.” —Blake Moret, CEO, Rockwell Automation
ROCKWELL AUTOMATION called for innovations from American kids ages eight through 17 years old in its “You Make It Challenge,” and three finalists will vie for the top prize in November. Louisa Wood, from Bayside, Wisconsin, suggested applying A.I. and sensors to sump pumps to cut basement flooding. Makai Samuels-Page of Atlanta designed an “anti-bully backpack” with a camera that would record in live time. And Michael Wilbourne of Roanoke, Virginia, conceived of a micro-flush toilet with an above-ground chamber to make third-world sanitation easier and cheaper. Through their schools, the finalists all will receive a company grant to the local FIRST youth robotics program, and the winner will get a $7,500 “maker’s kit.” So while the Milwaukee-based factory-automation giant won’t be turning their inventions into products, maybe the three youngsters will consider Rockwell Automation as a potential employer someday. “The persistent threat to the industry that we have to address is that there’s going to be a shortage of people with advanced manufacturing skills and interest in going to manufacturing companies,” says Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret. “We have to address it early with STEM-based education, starting when future workers are very young.” Rockwell’s initiative is just one example of how savvy employers are getting increasingly involved with future workers at
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ever-younger ages, mostly through schools. So high-school trainees now are tending intravenous lines for hospital patients in north Texas and learning the basics of weapon-component manufacturing on a trailer truck in Connecticut. Middle-school kids in Delaware are about to start learning coding via a program that was started for college students. And elementary-school children in northern Indiana are being regaled with the wonders of working in the region’s many recreational-vehicle factories. The employers involved are trying to address their acute labor needs as well as giving back to their communities, with a strategy that fits well when school funding is tight in many places, vocational education is coming into vogue, and the value of a college education increasingly is questioned. Going far beyond traditional measures such as raising funds for schools, serving on advisory boards, providing mentors and supplying some equipment, these companies are charging into local schools with their own curricula, personnel, hardware, software and an overall agenda for shaping the educational institutions—and the graduates they put out—more to their liking. Digging Deeper
“The only way to solve all these issues and a shortage of talent is to dig deeper into the education system, not only to provide college students with some additional skills before
