CINCINNATI — The Good Jobs Challenge is coming to the Queen City.
The Advanced Manufacturing Industry Partnership (AMIP) is collaborating with Cincinnati Works and Cincinnati Youth Collaborative to attract more people to manufacturing careers. The two-year workforce development action plan will focus on recruiting high school students and adults looking to make a career change.
“Since 2016, AMIP has been engaged with manufacturers, educators and community partners to build awareness and promote careers in manufacturing,” said AMIP Board Chair Amy Meyer.
Supporters of this new program said it couldn’t have come to Cincinnati at a better time. Meyer said it is estimated that over 2 million workforce jobs will go unfilled from now until 2025 across the country.
Lt. Gov. Jon Husted said filling workforce manufacturing jobs is difficult.
“The baby boom generation is retiring, subsequent generations just don’t have as many people in them. So Ohio and every state that borders Ohio have fewer people in the working age workforce now than we did 10 years ago and projections show that we may have fewer 10 years from now than we do now,” Husted said.
He noted not all high school graduates need to go to college to have a good career.
“We need every student to graduate career-ready,” Husted said. “We’re not going to create jobs in Southwest Ohio unless we have the talent because employers will just go somewhere else.”
Over the next two years, the Good Jobs Challenge Manufacturing Workforce Development & Retention Program will recruit 70 high school seniors from Hamilton, Butler, Warren, Clermont and Brown Counties. The new program will also support 40 advanced manufacturing employees to improve their knowledge and skills.
“AMIP is a connector organization. We work with four areas: government resources, the workforce needs of our manufacturers, our educators, and our community partners to do one thing. We build the workforce pipeline,” Meyer said.
She added they have more than 20 students in their first group of this program.
“Those students are going to be in a two-week intensive training program where they’re going to learn classroom skills and they’re going to learn a mixture of hands-on, classroom academics that will lead to an industry-recognized credential,” she said. “Once they graduate and are employed by one of our manufacturers, Cincinnati Works starts to work their magic and what that looks like is support services to ensure that those folks have the counseling and support that they need to be successful not only in their first year but throughout their entire career with that manufacturer.”
AMIP received $930,000 from a $23.5 million dollar grant awarded to the Ohio Manufacturers Association from the Good Jobs Challenge grant to fund the program. Cincinnati is one of the first cities in the state to start this program.
