LYNN — North Shore Community College’s partnership with local schools, including Lynn Vocational and Technical Institute, and area employees, has paid off.
The college has been awarded the Boston Foundation’s sixth annual Deval Patrick Prize for Community Colleges. North Shore received the $50,000 prize in recognition of its Machining Training Program, a collaborative partnership between NSCC, technical training institutions and local employers to prepare unemployed or underemployed workers for advanced manufacturing jobs.
The Boston Foundation is a charitable group that devotes its resources making sure opportunities are extended to everyone. It does this by aking grants to nonprofit organizations and designing special funding initiatives to address this community’s critical challenges, working in partnership with donors to achieve high-impact philanthropy; and serving as a civic hub and center of information, where ideas are shared, levers for change are identified, and common agendas for the future are developed.
North Shore established the Machining Training Program in its current form in 2017, building upon established efforts. The six-month, full-time certificate program combines foundational skills coursework at the college with hands-on technical training at local technical schools with career readiness components provided by the MassHire-North Shore Career Center.
Local employers provide input into the curriculum and best practices, ensuring that students completing the program are well-matched for local advanced manufacturing jobs. The program boasts a nearly 100 percent employment rate.
About 40 students complete the program annually. The Machining Training Program is also being used as the model for a regional workforce development program — the Advanced Manufacturing Expansion Program (AMTEP), funded by a grant from the GE Foundation, which will greatly expand the advanced manufacturing pipeline with the goal to train more than 900 participants by 2024, including unemployed and underemployed adults and underrepresented populations such as veterans, people of color, women, those without high school credentials, and non-native speakers of English.
“Our region’s community colleges are playing a critical role in developing our future workforce, and programs like the Machining Training Program can serve as a model for educators and employers to work together and prepare young people for family-sustaining jobs with living wages,” said Paul S. Grogan, president and CEO of the Boston Foundation.
“The Machining Training program has been the product of the effort of a number of partners, and we are pleased to share the award with them. Together with employers, technical training providers, NAMC (the Northeast Advanced Manufacturing program) and the dedicated work of the people at the heart of this program — the students who exhibit their dedication, hard work and tenacity every day — we are able to create opportunities for men and women to explore new careers,” said Dr. Nate Bryant, NSCC interim president.
Schools involved were Lynn Tech and Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School.
Students completed Foundational Skills including mathematics (such as calculations, Algebra, Trigonometry), Microsoft Office skills, technical communication skills such as memos, reports, research), and Introduction to Lean Manufacturing and Quality Control at NSCC.
The Foundational Skills curriculum supports the hands-on machining training at local technical schools (Lynn Vocational and Essex Tech) and is integrated with the career readiness components provided by the MassHire-North Shore Career Center.
As part of this ramp-up to increase training capacity within the partnership, North Shore acted as fiscal agent for Lynn Public Schools for a $1.6M Fiscal 2019 Massachusetts Skills Capital Grant Program award. The funds were used to purchase updated equipment and build out the machine shop at Lynn Tech, one of two sites used for hands-on machining training.