If you can’t figure out how to work your smartphone, that’s a “skills gap.”
But it’s a gap easily closed. Just ask an expert for help.
It’s the same with 21st-century advanced manufacturing. Only the devices are much more complex — computer-controlled systems, automated robotics — and the gap is much larger between the skills required to work in advanced manufacturing and the skills available in the workforce.
In some areas, this gap has slowed or stymied the resurgence of advanced manufacturing. In Georgia, though, qualified new, expanding and existing manufacturers can get expert workforce training help through Georgia Quick Start and the Technical College System of Georgia.
Quick Start is a unit within the technical college system that serves as a discretionary incentive and offers no-cost, comprehensive, customized workforce training to attract investment that creates jobs in Georgia.
That’s a powerful tool for economic development. New companies list workforce issues at the top of their list of concerns. Do the available employees have the needed skills and work ethic? Will they perform at the required level?
Quick Start answers those questions with customized workforce training solutions that work. The program is considered one of the state’s key assets to support new and expanding industries. The program can provide training in classrooms and mobile labs or on plant floors.
One example: Quick Start training for Kia Motors and many of its supplier companies has helped these companies create more than 14,000 direct jobs over the past five years. That’s just one case. Since beginning in 1968, Quick Start has provided training for 6,527 projects involving more than 1 million trainees. About 90 percent of these trainees were involved in advanced manufacturing.
Quick Start’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Surveys of site location consultants by Area Development magazine for the past four years have ranked Georgia No. 1 in the United States for its Quick Start workforce training program. The decade before that, Expansion Management ranked Quick Start No. 1 in the U.S.
At the end of the day, though, it’s the companies themselves that matter.
Rodger Brown is executive director of Georgia Quick Start.
