Our partners over at the Workforce Planning Board of Waterloo Wellington Dufferin have put together some great videos to highlight local manufacturing opportunities to youth and spread the word that manufacturing is alive and well and ripe with job potential.
The Workforce Planning Board of Waterloo Wellington Dufferin actively monitors the local labour force including that within the Manufacturing Industry. We recognize that although manufacturing employment fell dramatically during the recession it is now growing and the labour supply is getting tighter. Despite these growing employment opportunities, young people are telling us that they don't want to work in the industry. Parents, teachers and media are sending the message that "manufacturing is a dying industry" and even College courses are being cancelled due to lack of interested students.
We're trying to turn that around in a variety of ways, so in partnership with the Manufacturing Innovation Network, the Workforce Planning Board of Waterloo Wellington Dufferin developed 4 video vignettes to highlight local manufacturing opportunities to youth via social media outlets.
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A great message; but we need to spread it widely. The managers and other employees speaking in the above videos discuss some key features of the transition which manufacturing is undergoing, e.g. emphasis on skills (including multiskilling), new challenges presenting themselves, emphasis on training, heatlh & safety, etc. We also see a computer and technology-intensive workplace. By contrast, most members of the general public know very little about manufacturing and have an outdated mental picture of manufacturing plants. This even includes a large percentage of business people who work in sectors other than manufacturing. This widely held public view, unfortunately, does not bring to mind an environment full of learning opportunities and neat technolgy. It needs to be corrected by disseminating the type of information we see here.
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