CareerME's posterous

My past week’s travel to interview “career profiles” about advanced manufacturing jobs yielded excellent examples for the careerme.org homepage. High school students investigating careers in New Hampshire will soon have an opportunity to read about real people working in manufacturing that includes an electrical engineer, product design engineer, CAD specialist, electronic assembly technician, and CNC programmer.

All five participating companies offer very different views about manufacturing – from their industry classification, to the type of customer served, products manufactured, technologies implemented, facility sizes, and operational processes applied. What is not different about these manufacturers is a strong commitment to support their employees continued education, skills training and professional development and to take an active role in community and state level manufacturing education programs.

For example, BAE Systems in Nashua has developed a Manufacturing Internship Program for high school students to learn hands-on technical skills as well as communication, teamwork and dependability. Tidland Corporation’s participation with community leaders and educators helped launch a college rapid prototype laboratory to provide essential technological equipment for students and transitioning workers.

One message that came through “loud and clear” while talking with each careerme profile is how important the manufacturing courses and labs, plus dedicated and well-trained educators were to their success. Diverse course options at regional career and technical centers, like those offered by Tech Prep Manufacturing Career Cluster, helped some prepare for entry into a chosen field. Having education opportunities to continue to enhance skills and advance in their field strengthen these individuals and their organizations.

For the interviews, each career profile described experiences and expectations about their work including technologies used; the schools, classes and programs that helped them prepare for their role; plus down-to-earth advice for students exploring the field. An additional link will provide information about a project, product, or a process to show how they are involved in a manufacturing application.

The profiles for careerme.org’s New Hampshire homepage will be ready for student career exploration before school starts, closing out this traveler’s journal. Many career technology, community, and state college manufacturing education programs have already been added to careerme to take users directly to a school’s website. If you are interested to participate as a state or regional host partner like New Hampshire’s Information Technology & Manufacturing Partnership, please send an E-mail to info@careerme.org.

Added by Sandy Feola, National Center for Manufacturing Education on July 27, 2010

Images: BAE Systems, Tidland Corporation, Nashua Community College Mechanical Design Technology, Osram Sylvania, Timberland Company, Flight back to NCME

Collaboration and passion; an unbeatable "one-two" punch from multiple organizations in the Keene, New Hampshire area. With collaboration from New Hampshire's Department of Education's Tech Prep community, the local chapter of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Keene's Chamber of Commerce Workforce Development, and the area manufacturing businesses, high school students will have even more opportunities to pursue a variety of manufacturing education programs to prepare for entry into advanced manufacturing - any industry!

Education programs like the Sustainable Product Design and Innovation (SPDI) at Keene State College offers curriculum that integrate the social and scientific aspects of sustainability concerns into the current Product Design and Development option in Technology Studies. This program is targeted to meet the needs for high-tech, precision production, and businesses that are having trouble finding trained employees. Our first career profile interview this week, a Design Engineer at at Smiths Medical, is a recent graduate of this baccalaureate program. Our discussion about his career path quickly showed how he is successfully applying the mission of the program - taking design theory and practice, material sciences, production processes, digital technology, and the quantitative and qualitative issues of sustainability into business practices. To better understand high tech machining processes for metals manufacturing, high school students and teachers can use mycareerme.org an 'education-oriented social networking' tool to connect and collaborate with industry professionals like those at Tidland Corporation's Eastern Division. This organization manufactures advanced slitting systems , knives, air shafts, and core chucks using advanced manufacturing processes and equipment to produce a high quality product. Students logging onto mycareerme.org will be able to connect with our second career profile interview, a CNC Programmer at Tidland. He described his path leading to current job responsibilities for all aspects (set up to production) of multiple Computer Numeric Controlled Haas high performance turning equipment. If students working on a class project need help understanding part geometry using their class CAD system, they can connect on-line, ask questions and share their design to get real industry advice for manufacturability on equipment like a CNC lathe. The travel-time barrier for both the student and the industry mentor is removed with an electronic connection to get students "talking" directly with the industry-base that is eager to help our next generation of manufacturing professionals.

Thanks to the Keene support team, passionate about helping the NH students succeed: Vic Kissell, SME Chapter Monadnock No. 124 Chairperson and Sr. Production Supervisor at Tidland Corporation; Skip Marsh, SME Regional Membership Consultant for the northeast and business owner; Susan Newcomer, Workforce Development Coordinator for Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce; and Mary Laturnau, NH Dept. of Education's Manufacturing Career Cluster Regional Tech Prep Director. The career profiles for Smiths Medical and Tidland Corporation for New Hampshire navigation will be available in careerme.org upon my return to the NCME in Dayton, Ohio!

Added by Sandy Feola on July 21, 2010

Images: Tidland Corporation industry mentors; Keene State Community College SPDI project; Keene to Manchester drive for day 2!

Our careerme.org Regional Host Partners in Massachusetts and New Hampshire continue to actively involve, engage and promote advanced manufacturing with industry and education participants and promote programs for career awareness to students.

Released a little more than a year ago, careerme.org provides a powerful tool for their state organizations to present customize data about their advanced manufacturing industries, school programs, and related resource links to interest high school students. The national home page features advanced manufacturing career profiles oriented to a geographic location - about real people, working in all types of manufacturing careers, each having a diverse background.

So what does resizing the NCME office at Sinclair Community College (more classroom space is needed) have to do with career profile home pages? This move makes a perfect week to leave Ohio and explore New Hampshire's advanced manufacturing; to add five company and career profile stories to this state's home page. I will also look forward to meeting with Massachusetts STEM Pipeline Network members about using the new mycareerme.org tool for ways students can collaborate and communicate with engineers! My cube will be ready to move back into next week. So, with the help of NH's manufacturing career cluster Regional Tech Prep Director, it's a perfect time to gather excellent stories about advanced manufacturing career profiles in New Hampshire!

Added by Sandy Feola on July 18, 2010

Great things are planned, and have been happening in April for Project Lead the Way students and educators for the Kansas City Metro region - here's what we’ve heard!

MCC-Business and Technology Campus and University of Central Missouri  is sponsoring an open house on April 29^th for a new Technology Teacher Education program. The program is aimed not only at new high school graduates but also mid-career professionals in engineering/technology who might be interested in a teaching career. 

Invitation to the April 19^th Grand Opening Celebration for QM Power’s Clean Technology and Innovation Labs at the University of Missouri – Kansas City.  Their Clean Technology and Innovation Lab is the first such UMKC Incubation Space tenant in the Green Impact Zone, a move which lets QM Power and SCE have a closer, more synergistic environment for our collaborative efforts. 

Engineering program PLTW teachers were also introduced to careerme.org on April 6^th at a meeting hosted by Laura Loyacono and Ann Zimmerman to learn about ways to use careerme.org in their class and for the kinds of information that can be available to students to investigate. Some great ideas were generated by participating teachers during the discussion, especially about being able to identify all of the possible scholarships not well publicized for students – careerme.org is a great way to identify the links that get students right to the grant/scholarship opportunities so the students don’t have to hunt for an organization they would not think to even pursue!

April 8^th, students in the Van Horn H.S. Introduction to Engineering Design (IED) class toured Dimensional Innovations in Overland Park, KS to learn first-hand what kinds of things happen in an engineering environment that creates, designs, fabricates and installs everything they do.

Added by Sandy Feola on April 16, 2010

Welcome to www.careerme.org. We are a relatively new website offering a completely new approach to exploring careers, education programs, resources . . .  anything “advanced manufacturing”.

When we started conceptualizing this project the summer 2008 with requirements from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) – Education Foundation (http://www.smeef.org/index.html), the idea was to create a “web portal” to tell high school and college students, primarily between grades 11-14, that there are and will continue to be lucrative, high paying jobs in manufacturing; despite what you might have read in the newspaper or have seen on T.V.

Students should be encouraged to pursue an education and prepare for advanced manufacturing careers.

“Prepare American youth to be the next generation manufacturing workforce with the project based curricula and activities that excite and engage students in cutting edge ways”. This is one of three important missions that have led SME-EF to invest in more than $3.5 million over the past 29 years sponsoring many diverse youth programs to help students explore careers in STEM. The careerME.org  project supports this mission by helping students learn about manufacturing through the website.

Our project research during the design phase turned up more than 20 career exploration websites originating across the country that already offered good information about jobs, education programs, industries, summer camps, etc.; many using text descriptions and images, some displaying videos on the pages. These sites originated, like careerME.org, to meet a specific need for a targeted industry, a school program, a regional workforce development effort, about different careers, a trade organization, etc. to list just a few examples.

We also discovered that for many of these sites, not necessarily all, new information wasn't changing very frequently when we re-visited the sites after one month, two months, or three months. Maintaining fresh data on a website can be just as challenging as creating one.

The problem is, nothing stays the same – technology evolves; companies figure out new ways to tackle manufacturing problems; new products are developed that require new materials or different ways to make existing products better – which means that if students want to learn about these things, the website content should be dynamic and keep students interested by presenting a variety of ways to explore the information and staying current.

So our interpretation of “web portal” embodied a variety of words: dynamic, change, relevant, participative, evolving, visual, searchable, links, relationships, collaboration, reflective, informative, evolving, real-time, and meaningful. You get the message.

The careerME.org development approach was not to just create and display information, but to also provide a portal to get users linked to thousands of outstanding sources, efforts, programs, organizations, demonstrations, and much more that reflect the diversity of advanced manufacturing across the United States. If you are in education - as a high school student, counselor, teacher, college student, professor, department chair for example; or from industry as an engineer, technician, project manager, company process consultant, professional society member, on a college advisory committee - and passionate about what you do in manufacturing, you are what makes careerME.org.

The National Center for Manufacturing Education (NCME) is proud to have had the opportunity to create and maintain this advanced manufacturing “web portal” so students can go virtually “anywhere” to find all types of career content to discover “anything” related to advanced manufacturing.

So, if you are a student – start your search in states we are working on so far, but come back often and visit the site as the data grows with state and regional partner support. If you are an educator, tell your students about the site and use it too. Job shadow student participation is one program that you can try. If you are working in industry, participate by providing career profiles, your company profile, stories about your products and processes. If you are in a professional society like SME, tell your chapter organization members about the site and how they can participate through mentoring or submitting technology-sector industry facts for example.

Finally, we are working on the next new feature, to bring educational-social networking to the site. This will be called mycareerme, modeled after popular social networking sites so that students, educators, industry users can adopt and use the communication capabilities in a familiar setting. The goal of mycareerme is to enable collaboration and networking between students, teachers and industry. We will be beta testing over January, to be ready for you to use by March. Contact us and let us know where you are located and if you would like to be a beta school class or company!

In the meantime, we will be inviting members of the SME industry community to participate in this blog along with our NCME staff and invite you to comment, tweet and participate by exploring about advanced manufacturing using careerme.org to the many links pointing you to a variety of information available across the country! And, don't forget to tell us what's going on!

Added by Sandy Feola on January 4, 2010