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The Florida Advanced Technological Education Center (FLATE) recently published an insightful article on the growth and expansion of apprenticeships and co-ops as they work to address the workforce skills gap in the May issue of the FLATE Focus blog. The following text has been re-posted with their permission.

Executive Director Discusses Role of Apprenticeships and Co-ops in Addressing Workforce Skills Gap

Earlier this month President Obama announced additional funding opportunities from the Department of Labor for Community Colleges under the TAACCCT program (Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training) and separately, additional funding for apprenticeship programs. The second, $100,000,000 will be awarded later this year from H1-B funds for American Apprenticeship Grants. Apprenticeships are a proven path to employment and the middle class: 87% of apprentices are employed after completing their programs with an average starting wage for completers of over $50,000. The program will support several innovative projects that include: scale in-demand job training across the country through national industry partnerships; advance education & training to ensure seamless progressions, and improve statewide employment and education data integration and use.

Based on its survey of 625 businesses, the National Center for Supply Chain Technology Education (SCTE) estimates that 61,000 more supply chain technicians will be needed in 2015 than were employed in 2013.

To ensure that a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) degree actually leads to employment, students must prepare themselves for high-demand STEM fields, Elaine L. Craft, director of SC ATE Center of Excellence, said during a recent industry roundtable discussion with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at the Clemson University Center for Workforce Development.

Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Centers' industry surveys are excellent sources of information for students looking for careers in STEM fields with growth potential. Several of the most recent ATE industry surveys have identified strong demand for photonics technicians, supply chain technicians, computer and information technology (IT) technicians, and microsystems technicians.

Harley Wheeler (far left) and Jesse McDonald (middle), both juniors at Lewiston High School, talk over the design of their robot's arm with mentor Bryce Winterbottom, an associate mechanical engineer at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories. Their robot received a silver award at the Idaho SKILLS USA competition.

Industry mentors are helping Idaho high school educators transition from teaching traditional agriculture, woods, and metal shop classes to teaching engineering technology programs.

Teachers at the two largest high schools in the project report their mentors' expertise is filling gaps in their programs. "It got the kids really interested in learning technological design, because they were able to see that it's real world," Moscow High School Teacher Zachary Russell said of assistance he has received from Mike Meehan, president of Biketronics Inc.

Jesse McDonald, a Lewiston High School student, summarized the value of the help he has received from Bryce Winterbottom, an associate mechanical engineer at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) in Pullman, Washington, this way: "He knows what he's doing and he can tell us what we should do. And [he] teaches us how to do what we're doing better, how to avoid specific things you should not do in programming and building [robots]."

Wind energy technology students at Laramie County Community College work on yaw motors, the AC induction motors with planetary gears that turn turbines into the wind so they produce maximum electric energy.

Just three years after earning a wind energy associate degree from Laramie County Community College (LCCC), Travis Ford has been promoted by NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, from technician to associate wind site supervisor. Among his first supervisory tasks is the hiring of nine technicians to maintain the expansion of the company's Limon Wind Energy Center located about 90 minutes from Denver, Colorado.

Ford said strong mentors and his education helped him advance quickly. "Definitely my background, the schooling at LCCC helped me prepare for being a good wind technician and being able to step into leadership roles as needed," he said. Ford graduated from LCCC's two-year degree wind energy degree program in the spring of 2011. He was promoted in April 2014.

Demand remains strong for graduates of LCCC's wind energy program, which has received two Advanced Technological Education grants from the National Science Foundation since 2008. Six of the eight wind energy students who will graduate from LCCC in May already have jobs lined up, according to Bryan Boatright, the wind energy instructor at the public two-year college in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He expects the other two students to have jobs in some aspect of power generation before they graduate.

The starting salaries of new LCCC wind technology graduates range from $45,000 to $60,000 annually, Boatright said. A technician who travels for work assignments receives a per diem allowance for expenses along with a pay rate of about $17 per hour.

The cover photo of ATE Centers Impact is a mosaic that represents the 40 ATE centers and two large projects featured in the national publication. It is inspired by a photo of a technician performing gas tungsten arc welding that was provided by the National Center for Welding Education and Training (Weld-Ed).

ATE Centers Impact, which debuts this week at the annual convention of the American Association of Community Colleges in Washington, D.C., summarizes the accomplishments and activities of 40 Advanced Technological Education Centers (ATE) and two large ATE projects.

U.S. President Barack Obama points out in his introduction to the 114-page, full-color publication that during its 20-year history the National Science Foundation's ATE program has been part of the nation's proud tradition of ingenuity. "By building strong partnerships in education and industry, government and the non-profit sector, this program helps prepare students for their careers. And by building the technical workforce, it contributes to our Nation's security and economic competitiveness," President Obama wrote.

National Publication Highlights Each ATE Center

In addition to program-wide data from the Evaluation Resource Center for Advanced Technological Education (EvaluATE), each ATE center and large project is featured in distinct two-page spreads of text, photos, graphic illustrations of data that explain how they are improving technician education in advanced technology fields that are vital to the nation.

Infographics highlight the wide range of ATE activities. These include the 360? Center's Seamless Career Pathway in Minnesota, the national growth of the Convergence College Network, and the multiple enrollment goals of students in CREATE's renewable energy degree and certificate programs in California.

The diverse populations served by the ATE program are evident in the photos of students and graduates of ATE-supported programs that appear in photos throughout the publication.

Most of the people who responded to the ATE@20 usage survey are ATE principal investigators who have shared the book with colleagues, administrators, and industry partners.

ATE@20: Two Decades of Advancing Technological Education offers a glimpse into the discoveries and opportunities generated by Advanced Technological Education projects and centers during the past two decades.

A recent survey of readers found that in the four months after the book was released at the ATE Principal Investigators Conference in October 2013, its content has been reused and shared to reach key audiences beyond the ATE community.

ATE Central's goals for the publication and its companion ATE@20 blog include informing students and their relatives about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career opportunities; directing educators to ATE resources and professional development opportunities; and facilitating ATE principal investigators' connections with potential industry partners.

Single and multiple copies of the free book are available by emailing ate20@atecentral.net.

Davitte Khauv has worked as a laboratory technician at the Mayo Clinic since an internship there in 2007.

Davitte Khauv's internship in a Mayo Clinic research lab went so well that she was hired full time in 2007 when she completed her associate degree in biotechnology at Florida State College at Jacksonville (FSCJ).

Khauv, whose family immigrated to the United States from Cambodia when she was 18 months old, was influenced by her cousins' success in computer science and initially started work on a bachelor’s degree in this field before deciding she was more interested in laboratory work. She's happy she learned about FSCJ's biotech program during an internet search.

The college based its program to prepare technicians for careers in research labs on ATE initiatives in North Carolina, Texas, and California.

Khauv's advice to people considering biotech careers is: "Go for it! What you learn will be with you always and what you think you won’t need to learn will surprise you."

Mozilla's Open Badge Infrastructure offers a uniform, open-source process for documenting badges.

Nationwide, more and more employers say that they want to know what students have learned, what they have accomplished, and what they can do. One way to document and verify that information is digital badges, a solution gaining nationwide attention. And the ATE community is paying attention.

MATEC NetWorks has made public a one-hour webinar about Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastrusture, which is a free, open source program for uniformly documenting digital badges of skills and accomplishments. The GeoTech Center and Broadening Advanced Technological Education Connections (BATEC) are exploring the use of digital badges, which they are currently calling micro-credentials, in their curricula.

In a WGBH video Robert Chaney, award-winning Sinclair Community College math professor, (on the right) teaches algebra with the SAM vehicle that he and Fred Thomas developed with ATE grant support.

Discoveries that Robert A. Chaney, the 2013 Outstanding Community College Professor of the Year, made as an Advanced Technological Education principal investigator influence his teaching.

In November, the Sinclair Community College math professor received the national award for outstanding pedagogy from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (View his acceptance speech at the award ceremony. See Chaney teach in Modules 3 and 5 of WGBH’s Getting Results.)

Chaney's pedagogy involves students using the math machines that he and Sinclair colleague Fred Thomas, now retired from the college's physics department, developed with the support of several ATE grants from the National Science Foundation. Details about their development of math machines and formation of a non-profit corporation to continue their innovative work are the subject of the February 10 ATE@20 blog.

Robert Chaney, left, and Fred Thomas began working out their ideas for simple machines to teach math and science concepts as part of the Sinclair Community College faculty team developing curricula for the Dayton, Ohio, college's ATE manufacturing center in the 1990s. This photo was taken at a Learning with Math Machines Inc. workshop in 2013.

Sinclair Community College colleagues Fred Thomas and Robert Chaney took an entrepreneurial approach to their National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education project.

They formed Learning with Math Machines Inc., a non-profit company that provides interdisciplinary professional development workshops and sells their math machines. The machines are small robots and gadgets that facilitate adaptation of calculators, personal computers, and other readily available equipment to allow students to see and experience tactilely what happens when they manipulate algebra and other math and science concepts.

"If they [students] can express it algebraically they can see what happens immediately. It has an enormous effect on learning simply because they get immediate feedback. If it doesn't do what they want it to do, they don't have to wait for me to grade their paper," said Thomas. He's now retired from Sinclair and runs the day-to-day operations of the company as CEO.

Chaney continues to teach math at Sinclair using the math machines they developed with an ATE project grant. In November, he was selected as 2013 Outstanding Community College Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His award-winning pedagogy will be the subject of the February 17 ATE@20 blog.