Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1313710
18 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2020 "What do you want your workforce trained in?" Johnson: How active are your employers in defining the course material? Vanderford: We meet twice a year as a group to talk about how we can tailor the program. Once they hire someone in, we ask, "How is this person doing? Can we do anything to help train them further in some of our classes?" The degree becomes dynamic at that point. It's not the same program year after year, especially since everyone's elec- tronic products change. We just got the request last year to start doing hand solder train- ing in 01005 SMT resis- tors. We've been doing 0201s, and the company said, "We just bought more equipment for putting down smaller components, so we need someone familiar with hand dexterity." That's the skill that will get someone hired at one of these companies. It comes from the college taking accountabil- ity for their degree, talking to these companies, and discussing what their needs are. The com- panies drive the content of the curriculum, so we're teaching skills that are valuable toward that career path. Holden: There are lots of community colleges in the U.S., but I don't know if their graduates get good-paying jobs or have a work-study pro- gram like this, where they work and get paid while taking classes. This is financially an out- standing solution rather than going into heavy debt. Vanderford: Some of the bigger companies find that our tuition is so low and say, "A year in this degree costs as much as a class at a bigger university, so we'll just pay for your degree." ment of the program. Our TRAIN OH model that the NextFlex Institute of San Jose, Cali- fornia, helped us implement moves as much of our collegiate classes onto a two-days-per- week schedule, leaving the remaining three days per week to work. Here, the link was made that our whole program was built on—a bridge between industry and education. These aren't big manufacturing companies in Ohio; there's no Apple, HP, or Google here, but there are lots of mid-sized and smaller companies that make the products for the big- ger companies around us. There is a company that manufactures the parts that go into hos- pital equipment for a large biomedical man- ufacturing company. One company manufac- tures all of the products that go into a leading blender and food pro- cessing brand. Another company with around 120 employees manu- factures products for a well-known MRI sys- tem. Other companies we're in contact with include one that makes radios for the nautical industry that are built to block sailing environments, one that does contract-level packaging, and one that makes small PCBs for camera lens systems for vision placement robots. Every time we find a new company that's interested, we're excited. A lot of these com- panies and startups don't have globally recog- nized names, but they manufacture for them, and they need help, too. On top of that, LCCC has a business incubator, the Desich Entrepre- neurship Center, where companies with up to 25 employees can rent space for low-volume manufacturing general office stuff. There are approximately 20 companies in those build- ings right now. If those companies hire a stu- dent out of the college, their rent that they pay to the college goes down, and Courtney and I are the ones knocking on their doors, asking,