"The college's manufacturing program has been the best return on investment for our company. If you’re a manufacturing industry leader and believe that people are the most important asset, then you need to be sponsoring students in this program."
David William Davis
President & Chief Operating Officer,
Simmons Machine Tool Corporation
Encouraging the next generation of employees to explore new career options right in their own backyard is essential to continued economic growth in the Capital Region.
Future-ready workers don’t always come neatly packaged with standardized resumes, traditional credentials and linear career paths.
The Capital Region Regional Council is working to overcome those challenges for the benefit of the entire region and New York State as we embrace the future.
For years, regional employers identified the acute shortage of skilled workers as an obstacle to the growth of their businesses. Through collaboration between industry leaders and educators, a plan was developed to respond to this critical industry need. Employers such as the Watervliet Arsenal (Watervliet), General Electric (Schenectady), Package One (Schenectady), Simmons Machine Tool (Albany) and many other manufacturing companies in the region have hired HVCC students in the past, but the college could not produce enough skilled workers in the existing facility to meet the growing need.
In response, HVCC began planning a new 37,000 square-foot facility. In their planning, HVCC made accommodations to train more students and including under-employed two- and four-year graduates by creating certificate programs to help address the manufacturing skills gap throughout the region.
Without support from ESD, which provided $2.9 million of the $14.5 million project, this great program would not be available to our region’s students…and, ultimately, our well-trained students would not be available to our region’s talent-hungry employers.
Today, the Center has become one of the leading advanced manufacturing training centers in the United States.
Graduates of the program can immediately enter the workforce as tool makers, industrial maintenance technicians, and machinists/programmers among many other technical and supervisory roles.
It is estimated that over the next 10-years the Advanced Manufacturing Training Program at HVCC will generate: