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Job training one effective tool for recruiting companies
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
While tax breaks and favorable zoning changes might be what gets the bells and whistles sounding, a 45-year-old state program geared toward providing new and expanding businesses with a startup workforce may well be the most effective of South Carolina’s commercial incentive programs.
“We hear it every time we survey program participants,” said Lawrence Ray, spokesman for the South Carolina Technical College System.
“And what they tell us is that having a workforce ready to go the day they open their new or expanded facility here was either the determining or a significant contributing factor to their decision to locate in South Carolina rather than some other state.”
The program, the Center for Accelerated Technology Training, receives an annual $2.5 million from state coffers. It is administered by the South Carolina Technical College System with the purpose of providing customized training to new and expanding industries in South Carolina, which is the same purpose it has had since it was established in the 1960s.
Like other incentives used for economic development, its justification is that there are public benefits associated with the private costs employers must bear when they relocate, build or expand a facility within the state.
But unlike other incentive programs tied to benchmarks that may not be perceived or understood by the general public, the cross-benefits of subsidizing a company’s new employee training costs is a more obvious win-win, Ray said.
“More skilled workers means a more productive economy,” he said.
Since 1961, CATT has trained 230,000 South Carolinians for new jobs with more than 1,800 companies. In the past year, 8,500 prospective workers have gone through one of its training programs.
Among those taking advantage of the program in the tri-county region are DaimlerChrysler, AstenJohnson and, most recently, Vought Aircraft Industries Inc. and Alenia North America, for whom CATT, in collaboration with Trident Technical College, is now training a second class of prospective employees.
The Hollings connection
Retired U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings, then governor of South Carolina, established the program in 1961 to foster the recruitment and growth of the manufacturing industry in the state.
Its premise was and remains straightforward—to offer trained employees to a company from the day it begins operations.
“Back in the 1960s, Hollings conferred with other state leaders and realized that in order for South Carolina to grow, it had to have a manufacturing base,” Ray said.
“Those discussions also lead to the establishment of the technical college system because state lawmakers realized that in order to be effective and to prevent students from having distance as an obstacle, we needed to have technical training centers throughout the state.”
Today, Trident Technical College is one of 16 technical colleges throughout the state.
Back when the program was first established, Hollings and his colleagues were considered men ahead of their time. Today, 47 of the 50 states offer some type of customized job training program to companies expanding or relocating, and together they budget nearly $360 million for these programs annually.
But Hollings and his successors have wanted more than to be able to say they lured an out-of-state or international employer to the Palmetto State. In return for training their startup workers, the state has insisted that companies seeking the incentive must create new jobs, pay a competitive wage and provide benefits to their employees.
Presently, the Technical College System is involved in designing or implementing specific training programs for more than 170 companies. Fifty-six percent of those are new companies, and 44% are existing companies that are in the midst of an expansion.
Individualized training
“The beauty of the program is the training is individualized based on an assessment performed by CATT and the company itself,” Ray said. “We look at the industry the company’s in, its work process, the number of steps an individual worker takes to complete a project, and then craft the training program accordingly.”
Individual programs share some common components, covering basic industrial safety and first aid, quality management, team building, supervisory development training and statistical process control, but the similarity often ends there.
For Vought, for instance, Trident Technical College has designed an all-new program to teach prospective employees how to work with the revolutionary composite material that will be used in the fuselages of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner aircraft.
The amount of funding involved, like the type of individualized training offered, is also dependent upon the project.
The money allocated to a specific program depends on a number of factors, Ray said. These include the size of the factory, the number of workers and the type of training required.
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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