Training The Workforce Before It Gets On The Job
Verizon, Bristol-Myers look to college partnerships to keep worker pipeline flowing
But at a recent discussion of employment in the MetroWest area, Verizon Human Resources Director Denice C. Ware said the "just in time" philosophy is making its way into corporate thinking about hiring.
Rapid Deployment
Companies don't want to hire new employees and then put up with low productivity for weeks or months while they get up to speed, she said. But at the same time, high schools and colleges don't always give their graduates the job skills they need.
The solution some companies have come up with is to work closely with colleges, helping to design classes where students learn precisely what they will need to know on the job.
Hopkinton-based EMC has worked with schools for years to help them improve science and technology offerings. But the notion of designing its own course came just two years ago, after managers noticed that the college graduates they were hiring knew plenty about software, databases and networks, but little about information storage technology.
"It's a topic that's not being taught," said Ed VanSickle, a senior technical education consultant at EMC.
So the company developed a program known as EMC Academic Alliance, designing an information storage class that is now taught at more than 170 colleges. Many of those colleges are in India and China, but 28 are in the U.S., including Worcester and Framingham State Colleges and Qunsigamond Community College.
Drug Of Choice
For Bristol-Myers Squibb, finding colleges interested in a partnership with the company was a prerequisite for locating its new biomanufacturing plant in Devens. Edward Terceiro, executive vice president of Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, said the company saw the importance of working not only with top research institutions like Worcester Polytechnic Institute but also with MWCC, which is now training a group of students who could be some of the first manufacturing technicians at the new plant.
However, aligning training too closely with a particular employer's openings could be dangerous. No college wants to prepare students for positions that might disappear or have no openings by the time they graduate. But Terceiro and Qunisigamond Dean of Business and Technology Kathy Rentsch both said they aren't worried that their classes will limit their students' prospects.
Terceiro said he does expect to offer more sessions of its biotechnology classes during the years that Bristol-Myers is growing its work force and then taper down when the facility reaches its full size. But he said the school's program will also prepare students for other jobs in biotech that he expects to pop up in the coming years.
Rentsch said the process of adopting the EMC class was just a more extreme version of something the school does all the time - working with local employers to make sure students are getting training that will matter in the workplace.
"It absolutely works from the perspective of working with the key hiring partners," she said.
Rentsch said the college has also been offering a class in robotics and automation for the past seven or eight years that was originally designed to channel graduates into jobs at Intel. Today, she said, there is a demand for those skills at many other companies. And she said another class is closely aligned with Verizon's needs. In general, she said, the skills that a large company like EMC is looking for will also end up being in demand at some of the many other companies that it does business with.
For EMC, the fact that the Academic Alliance program prepares students to work at other companies is actually an advantage. VanSickle said the company certainly wants to see some graduates seek employment there, but it also wants new employees at all sorts of companies to be well-versed in information storage issues. He said a worker with knowledge of data storage systems will encourage companies to buy them when it's appropriate.
"What we're in some respects propagating for the future is buyers of the technology," he said.
VanSickle isn't just talking about EMC products either. While the company was preparing the Academic Alliance program, it held a focus group with companies that use storage systems from both EMC and other vendors. It found they were more interested in employees with a broad understanding of storage technology than those with skills in specific systems. So EMC organized the program to offer a broad view of the field with examples from both its own products and those sold by other companies.
"What we feel is we're doing a real good thing for the IT community as a whole," VanSickle said.
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