Central Indiana Corporate Partnership Inc. has provided a $231,000 grant to Ball State's Center for Organizational Resources to help train Indiana's work force in advanced manufacturing.
"Promoting and brokering the latest training will enhance the manufacturing base and ultimately keep jobs in Indiana," said Frank Sabatine, dean of the School of Extended Education.
During the next eight months, COR will develop a model to broker training opportunities for manufacturers. The model will more quickly connect employers with training vendors, said Delaina Boyd, director of COR.
"We are just at the point of collecting data. We should be able to finalize the plan by September," Boyd said.
This project will bolster Ball State's reputation as one of Indiana's premier universities for workforce development, Sabatine said.
"Ball State has demonstrated effectiveness with understanding learning models in both academic and workplace settings," Lee Lewellen, vice president of CICP, said. "CICP hopes to deploy the experience of the university toward addressing a critical issue for one of the state's critical industry clusters."
Lewellen could not point to a specific example of Ball State's demonstration of the learning model.
Increasingly, as computers are integrated into the manufacturing process, there is an ongoing need to upgrade workers' skills and teach them new manufacturing processes, Lewellen said.
He said in some cases, there is a desire on the part of some employers that employees have the opportunity to continue to upgrade their personal skills such as reading, math comprehension and application.
COR's proposal was selected because it mirrors the 'just in time' process many manufacturers have adopted to control their inventory and applies it to training and workforce development, Lewellen said. The model also begins to anticipate human capital needs for the growth of advanced manufacturing opportunities.
'Just in time,' refers to the process manufacturers use to reduce the amount of inventory they have on hand at any particular time. This is done in order to cut the cost of storage and transportation and deliver needed parts to the factory just when they are needed for the day's assembly, Lewellen said.
"We hope to reduce the time it takes an employer to find the training resource needed, thereby increasing the productivity of workers," Lewellen said.
In some cases, it takes employers weeks, months, half-a-year or longer to find a vendor to provide the training needed for employees, Lewellen said.
"The whole state is evolving to stay competitive. This will help the work force to get trained in information-related technology. We are just really getting started. The project is, however, on the fast track, and we expect to have a working model by the end of the summer," Sabatine said.
In an effort not to start from the very beginning, COR is partnering with companies that have experience with similar initiatives, Boyd said. For this project, the center will work with Futureworks, based in Massachusetts, and Indianapolis-based Thomas P. Miller and Associates.
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