Emily Stover DeRocco Speech

Integrated Systems Technology
Grant Announcement
Illinois State University

Bloomington, IL
January 31, 2005

Thank you Dr. Bowman. I'm thrilled to be here today. Thank you, Toni McCarty, for the great work you've done at the Center.

And thank you, Congressman Weller, for your support of this most important program. Your commitment to policies that foster job creation is well known and through programs like IST we will continue to train workers with the skills needed to find and succeed in those jobs.

Today, American manufacturing finds itself in a very different world compared to 25 or 10 or even 5 years ago. We are now competing in a global economy where customers in the United States are connected in real-time to suppliers in South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The time from production to market has been cut from months to days and the cost of labor in some countries is pennies per unit.

American manufacturers must operate in this reality because there is no going back. The speed of communication and travel and trade and the interdependence of economies and institutions across international borders make protections and tariffs a false hope.

So to compete in this ultra-competitive global industry, American manufacturers had to do more than simply improve; they had to transform. Old-line, bulky manufacturers have gone lean or cellular, creating ultra-productive and efficient operations capable of crafting products of the finest quality just-in-time for market demand. This was a difficult and painful transition, but American manufacturing is now the healthiest it has been in many years.

With these new processes though, come new demands on the manufacturing workforce. As part of President Bush's High Growth Job Training Initiative, I met with executives and human resource professionals from many areas of the manufacturing industry and something I heard at nearly every meeting was that they were desperate for workers.

The orders were coming in faster than they could fill them and if they could find the workers, they had enough business to run three full shifts 6 days a week.

The reason why they struggled to find workers was that the transformation in the industry was not just from bulky to lean, but from traditional to advanced. No longer were good hands and a strong back enough to be successful in manufacturing.

Today workers need skills in math and engineering and computer programming while understanding supply-chain management and the integration of automated systems. Almost overnight, manufacturing went from a low-skill occupation to a high skill occupation.

So, how can we solve this skill shortage and help American manufacturers reach their potential? It must be through partnerships that include employers, educators, and the public workforce system. And I am here today to recognize and reward just such a partnership.

Almost two years ago now, the Department of Labor gave one of its first High Growth grants to create the National Center for Integrated Systems Technology. The Center, a collaboration between Illinois State University and some of America's biggest manufacturers, was created to train workers in Illinois and Ohio in these new skills.

I am proud to say that the program has been a tremendous success with hundreds of students learning new skills and being hired by hundreds of employers. In fact, it has been such a success and the demand for the program by other states so great, that the Department of Labor is back to increase its commitment.

With new funding from the President's High Growth Job Training Initiative, ISU's National Center for Integrated Systems Technology will:

1. Expand the training curriculum to create an associate degree program;
2. Enhance the highly successful apprenticeship model to assist more participants and work with more business partners;
3. Create a comprehensive career ladder and lattice by standardizing career competencies; and
4. Replicate this outstanding model in four additional states by creating regional centers of excellence in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming. These new centers will be developed at four community colleges that have demonstrated their success in partnering with and serving the workforce needs of their region's manufacturers.