Bridging the Skills Gap: Students See Opportunity

On Tuesday, December 16, 2014, Okuma hosted more than 50 local students at our “A Day at Okuma America Corporation” event. Our goals were to demonstrate that manufacturing is a cool, high-tech environment, and to help students see the rewarding career opportunities available in the today’s modern machine tool industry. A team of Okuma sales and technical professionals spent the day explaining the world of machine tools, after which the group toured the facility to see state-of-the-art CNC machine technology in action.

Future Workforce

In recent years, the U.S. manufacturing industry has been leading economic growth. While this is welcome news, business growth has also created a shortage of skilled people who can keep manufacturing running strong. Today there is a significant increase in career opportunities, with many job openings for machine tool operators, programmers and service professionals. As manufacturing professionals, it’s important that we take responsibility to help students understand education paths into manufacturing, so we can maintain a skilled workforce into the future.

Just the Beginning

There are thousands of brilliant minds right in our own backyard, and we want to reach as many as possible. So this event is just the beginning of an ongoing series of events targeted at students. Our next event at Okuma will be held this coming May, following the same format as our December event. We also plan to host an event for students to celebrate Manufacturing Day in October, in addition to hosting the A Day at Okuma America Corporation as part of our annual Open House event in December.

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