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Georgia Pacific, UAM-CTC Team Up to Train Workers for 21st Century

6 min read

A worker-training technique that evolved in the Middle Ages is gaining new currency in 21st century Crossett.

Georgia-Pacific, Ashley County’s largest employer, has partnered with the University of Arkansas at Monticello College of Technology-Crossett on a pilot program to develop the highly skilled manufacturing workers that GP needs but has had trouble finding.

The Advanced Manufacturing Technician Program combines classroom education with on-the-job training that looks a lot like apprenticeships of old. Students in the five-semester program take courses at the college that count toward an Associate of Applied Science Degree while also working 24 hours a week at the GP paper mill in Crossett.

GP has committed $150,000 over a two-year period to the program, which covers the students’ tuition, fees, books and supplies, and it pays the students — starting at $12 an hour — for their work at the mill. The company calls the partnership the Georgia-Pacific Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education or GP Fame and says that students in the program “are not only receiving training for a future job; they also are obtaining a high-level technical education and practical job experience.”

The program has another big benefit: Students have the potential to gain this education, training and experience debt-free.

The program, which began last fall with a class of six, seeks “to close the skills gap that we were seeing in the marketplace,” said Chris Clark, senior human resources manager at the GP plant in Crossett. There was “an uneasiness about the future,” he said.

GP was questioning how it would find the workers capable of responding to changes in the industry and in overall technology, he said, asking itself, “How are we going to be able to keep up with that and compete with other manufacturers?

“For me, the overall deciding factor was we looked at [the kinds of potential employees] we were able to bring in and just realized that we’re going to have to improve that,” Clark said. “How do we do that? That was the question.”

The answer came to Clark at a pulp and paper conference at which he heard a presentation on the Kentucky Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education, or KY FAME. GP used that program as a model.

An example of a job at the GP paper mill for which the program will train is a converting technician, a worker who converts “large rolls of paper into the packaged, salable product that you find on the shelves of Wal-Mart,” products like Quilted Northern Ultra Strong & Soft.

Converting technicians “deal with robotics, conveyors, different machines that unwind the rolls of paper, cut it up,” Clark said. “And so a lot of what we’re teaching flows through that arena and gives them a background in how to troubleshoot these machines, how to work on them, how to keep them running as efficiently as possible.”

UAM-CTC was “extremely excited” about the potential of the program when GP broached the subject, Clark said. “They were willing to help us in any way that they could.”

“In terms of an industry partnership with education, I really think they are the model for that type of relationship,” he said.

Clark said in his previous experience in partnering with educational institutions, “it’s really been more on the outside looking in, and this partnership really took it to the next level where we’re hand in hand, sitting at the table, developing the curriculum, talking about how to make the program successful, involved with the students directly.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better partnership than UAM-CTC.”

Linda Rushing, vice chancellor at UAM-CTC, said the school had worked in the past with Georgia-Pacific and had “a wonderful working relationship” with the company. She called G-P “visionary” in its proposals for education projects.

“When they come to us with a need, we know that it’s something that not only will address their training needs but is something that our other area employers need,” Rushing said.

Clark and Cathie Hillier, training manager at the G-P plant, worked with Rushing; Janie Carter, assistant vice chancellor of UAM-CTC; and Campbell Wilkerson, a career development facilitator and instructor at the school, to develop the pilot program and the curriculum. The school wants the program to serve not only Georgia-Pacific but other companies, Rushing said.

“The beauty of this project is that when some of these other companies have heard about what we’re doing, they’ve said, ‘What can I do to join?’”

A two-year $988,570 grant from the Arkansas Department of Higher Education to the University of Arkansas at Monticello’s Workforce Alliance of Southeast Arkansas is helping fund the program, Rushing said. The grant is aimed at supporting technical training and career readiness. “This FAME program is just one small portion of that grant,” she said, which contributes $25,000 toward supplies.

As students progress through the program, Clark and Rushing said, they can move up from earning $12 an hour to $14 and then $16 an hour by the last semester.

This apprentice-style program “provides an opportunity for talented students who may not have an opportunity to go to a four-year institution, who may not be able to afford college any other way,” Clark said.

Timothy Griffin, 19, of Monticello started the program in August. “I thought it was a great opportunity to get the experience and get the schooling at the same time,” he said. “And being able to go through school debt-free is also a great perk of it.”

Griffin is currently taking electrical and mechanical classes and later will be taking welding and production courses.

When he first started his part-time job at the GP mill, Griffin and his classmates “went to every spot in the mill, just to get a little feel of how it went.” Now, however, the students each have their own posts, running the machines with the operators at that spot.

“They teach us how the machine works and some little tricks that they’ve picked up over the years, and they give us advice,” Griffin said. “They actually let us run the machines too.”

He enjoys the work. “And I’ve always learned better hands-on,” Griffin said. “So being able to go out in the mill and actually look at it and touch it and do it helps a lot.”

The program helps students determine whether manufacturing is a career choice they want to make, Rushing said.

“Manufacturing, they have to turn out a product that meets the need of the user,” she said. “And our graduates from this program have got to meet the work needs of the regional employers.”

“This apprenticeship program is just like a two-and-a-half-year interview,” Rushing said. “We always tell our students in our practicum courses: ‘This is your interview. Don’t blow it.’”


Apprenticeships Gaining Attention
Work apprenticeships made the news last month when Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of cloud computing company Salesforce, pitched President Donald Trump on the goal of creating 5 million apprenticeships in the next five years.

Benioff was at a meeting with U.S. and German business and political leaders, including Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany and other European countries are known for strong apprenticeship programs that offer students education and career opportunities outside of a traditional four-year college program. The programs have come to encompass white-collar as well as blue-collar jobs.

Although not as popular in the U.S., apprenticeships are growing, according to the Department of Labor.

Chris Clark of Georgia-Pacific says participating in apprentice-style programs like GP FAME take commitment on a company’s part, but “when I saw the potential benefit of it, I thought there was no way we couldn’t do it,” he said.

“I hope it becomes the wave of the future because that way employers are directly involved in shaping the type of future employees they want and need.”

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