Community college receives aviation training grant
September 26, 2012, 05:20 pm
The host of Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe, confronted the problem facing Alabama and looming throughout the nation; the shortage of skilled workers.
"A third of Alabama’s skilled tradesmen are over 50, and they are retiring fast,” Rowe said in a promotional commercial for Go Build Alabama. "Yet who’s replacing them? No one."
Since realizing the shortages of skilled workers, public and private efforts have increased to promote skilled trades and highly technical training. These jobs include welding, plumbing, industrial maintenance, precision machining and electrical engineering, and can pay $60,000 a year.
In an effort to ramp up the skilled workforce in the aviation community, the U.S. Department of Labor recently awarded a maintenance training grant, worth $1.5 million, to Ivy Tech Community College-Northeast in Indiana to help displace workers throughout the area.
With help from the grant, the community college's Aviation Maintenance Technology program is expected to create 501 skilled aviation maintenance workers over the next three years through accelerated training. The specialized programs offer various areas of study including quality and health safety, assembly mechanics, electrical assembly, composite repair, quality assurance and tooling.
“This grant will focus on training for TAA-eligible dislocated workers, veterans and others seeking work in the aviation industry,” said Jim Aschliman, executive director of Ivy Tech Corporate College in Fort Wayne. “With the recent dedication of our new $2.3 million Aviation Center at Smith Field Airport, the timing for this announcement could not have been better.”
The school was given the grant through its membership to the National Aviation Consortium, which recently awarded a $14.9 million grant through the Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) Grant Program. The consortium's primary goal is to provide training to 2,500 student to fill jobs that are vacant due to unskilled workers across five states.
The Obama administration’s Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 provided $2 billion to fund the TAACCCT program throughout the next four years. On September 19, some of that money was distributed between 297 schools, each receiving about $500 million in grants. The grants included 27 community colleges and university consortia receiving a total of more than $350 million and individual institutions which received more than $78 million.
For receiving these grants, benefactors are required to collect student data each year and conduct final evaluations at the end of the grant period The information is then used to improve strategies and knowledge in placing graduates in the job market.
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