Educators, business leaders meet to plan return of manufacturing jobs to southwest IL
Madison County Employment and Training and the St. Clair County Department of Intergovernmental Contracts will bring local educators and manufacturing industry leaders together for a round table discussion of new facilities and training opportunities coming to the metro-east.
The event will be held from 9 a.m. to noon on Tuesday at the Gateway Convention Center, 1 Gateway Drive. Business leaders, workforce development organizations, elected officials and the public also have been invited.
“The primary goal of the event is to bring awareness to some of the manufacturing opportunities that are present in our region,” said Lee A. Reese, Regional Apprenticeship Navigator for the St. Clair County Intergovernmental Grants Department Workforce Group. “... They can see that we are really taking the lead in bringing manufacturing back to our region.”
Some local colleges and high schools have responded to a call to train more students in the building trades and technical careers.
Belleville Township High School District 201, for example, recently closed on the purchase of the former Kings Point tennis and fitness center off Illinois 15 with plans to convert it to a new advanced vocational center for Belleville East and West students.
The career training center is one of the new opportunities to expand the manufacturing workforce in the metro-east that will be discussed in Collinsville on Tuesday, Reese said.
“We have a strong partnership now in our area with education, businesses, and overall, we kind of mapped out that if we work together, our region benefits better,” he said. “At the event we’re going to showcase some work-based learning techniques, like internship to apprenticeship.
“So we’re going to show how we are putting together our high school educators, with our college educators, with our businesses to develop their talent.”
The event will include panel presentations from education and manufacturing leaders in the region.
Southwestern Illinois College has a new advanced manufacturing center in Belleville, as well as a new Mobile Advanced Manufacturing Lab, that will be on site at the event for visitors to tour.
Kaskaskia College and Lewis and Clark Community College will give a presentatoin on the training programs at their campuses. St. Louis University’s Center for Additive Manufacturing, which is the use of large 3-D printing machines to make components for Boeing, also will be present.
There will be presentations by several non-traditonal manufacturers, like Gilster Mary-Lee, a private label food manufacturer headquartered in Chester. The company has approximately 3,000 employees that work in 13 different manufacturing facilities across three states.
Other manufacturers represented will include M.A.C Medical, of Millstadt, TerraSource Global and Waterfall Glen Soap.