Marketplace Today Blog

By Scott Williams
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Technical colleges in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Kenosha and Fond du Lac believe they can help struggling manufacturers better as a group than any one campus could do individually.

First up for the newly formed Southeastern Wisconsin Technical College Manufacturing Consortium will be an interactive database that companies can use to locate worker training programs.

If one college does not have what an employer needs, maybe another will.

“I think there will be something there for every employer,” said Deborah Davidson, vice president of Gateway Technical College.

The Kenosha-based institution is being joined in the consortium by Milwaukee Area Technical College, Waukesha County Technical College and Moraine Park Technical College.

For its database project, the group has received a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor’s WIRED initiative, Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development.

The interactive service could be available for manufacturing companies by April.

But officials hope it is the first of many projects undertaken by the tech school alliance to support a manufacturing sector that has been losing about 10,000 jobs a year in Wisconsin for the past decade.

“It’s a starting point,” said Michael Mortell, coordinator of the WIRED initiative through the Regional Workforce Alliance of Southeastern Wisconsin.

As planned, the database will allow manufacturing firms to put in information about their companies’ training needs and then locate appropriate programs at the two-year technical colleges.

Administrators of the four neighboring campuses forged the alliance after discovering that all of them were struggling with the same obstacle: trying to serve manufacturers that did not themselves know how to structure their employee training.

“We can step in together,” said Margaret Ellibee, vice president of Waukesha County Technical College. “It’s just another great example of technical colleges pulling together to do the best for our customers.”

Starting in 2003, the statewide tech school system launched the Advanced Manufacturing Solutions concept, which was intended to help companies get started or expand.

The new consortium is focused strictly on southeastern Wisconsin, which received $5 million through the federal WIRED initiative to stimulate innovative job-training ideas.

Mortell said the alliance of tech schools represents an important step in building a regional approach to improved worker training.

“They all have a lot of expertise,” he said. “And they all see what needs to be done.”