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Help wanted
Trident Tech apprentice program tackles technical maintenance need
By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer
Each year for the next five years, there will be an average of 60 job openings for electrical technicians and an average of 80 job openings for maintenance and repair technicians in South Carolina, according to the S.C. Employment Security Commission’s occupational projections.
However, although the demand for such personnel is strong, the work force supply is weak.
“Industrial companies are finding it difficult to find skilled maintenance employees,” said John Snowden, Trident Technical College’s vice president of continuing education and economic development.
To help fill those positions, manufacturers are training employees they already have.
That is the purpose of Trident’s apprenticeship program for mechanical and electrical technicians, an initiative the technical college announced in November that will launch in January, thanks largely to a $100,000 donation from the Alcoa Foundation.
“This program assures a pipeline of capable technicians who are appreciative of the opportunity and committed to their employers,” Snowden said.
The program will include mechanical and electrical academic courses leading to a certificate that could be applied toward an associate’s degree, plus hands-on training at the company site.
Employees will spend four days a week doing hands-on work at their company and one day a week taking classes at the college, Snowden explained.
Trident has been working with 26 local companies in the automotive and heavy-manufacturing industries to participate in the program, which will begin with 12 employees, Snowden said.
When they complete the four-year program, employees will earn between $14 and $20 an hour, depending on the industry they work in and the company they work for, Snowden said.
The program’s mechanical courses range from maintenance of hydraulic and pneumatic systems to generators to piping systems. Electrical maintenance fields range from circuits to solid-state devices to motor controls, said Chris Lang, Trident’s dean of industrial and engineering technology.
Recruiting troubles
Nationally, more than 850 occupations have registered apprenticeship programs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, which registers such programs.
“I have met with thousands of employers who tell me about the work force problems that plague their businesses and keep them from being more competitive nationally and globally: inability to recruit high-skilled employees, poor quality of work, low productivity and high turnover rates,” Emily Stover DeRocco, the U.S. Department of Labor’s assistant secretary for employment training, said in “Strengthening Our Nation’s Workforce with Demand-Driven Solutions,” a Labor Department publication.
In March, the Charleston Regional Business Journal reported the difficulty local manufacturers are having in recruiting young workers.
“The pipeline of workers and youth is here,” said Jennifer DeWitt, program administrator for the Lowcountry Manufacturers Council. “However, that pipeline is not funneling toward manufacturing, industrial and other technical fields, which is a problem. Manufacturers are dealing with an aging work force, and the younger work force is not adequately replacing the older, existing work force, nor do they have the needed skills to do so.”
Apprenticeship concepts such as Trident’s can help solve that problem, Snowden said.
“Our local industry folks see it as a dependable approach to providing technicians over the long haul.”
Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.
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