Colleges, Employers Team Up to Train, Hire High-Tech Workers

Tom Hubschman adjusts his safety glasses as sparks fly from the computer-controlled plasma torch slicing through a piece of metal. The Boston University mechanical engineering major is working on his senior design project in the school’s 9-month-old Engineering Product Innovation Center. At his disposal are hardware and software for computer-assisted design and 3-D prototyping, a machine shop, an automated robotic manufacturing line, a metals foundry and a carpentry shop.

These riches are the result of a collaboration with four big partners – General Electric Aviation, Schlumberger, Procter & Gamble and technology company PTC – plus a substantial investment by the university.

Any BU student interested in taking a product from design to manufacturing is welcome at EPIC, although the chief beneficiaries are the future engineers. Having access to cutting-edge technologies while in college can lower the odds of making costly and time-consuming mistakes later – when the task is to design parts for a jet engine, for example – and thus be a big advantage in the job search.

Engineering grads "can say, ‘Oh yes, I know that machine, and not from a book. I’ve worked with it. I’ve had my hands on it,'" Hubschman says.

[Check out the Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs rankings.]

Businesses expect to reap the rewards in the form of experienced hires; a recent Gallup poll reported that only about 1 in 10 business leaders "strongly agree" that American higher education is graduating students equipped for their workforce.

"Industry is not getting either the quality or quantity of employees they need," says Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. "So they are having to get involved."

Besides EPIC’s four principal partners, companies like Stanley Black and Decker and GibbsCAM have donated money, equipment or software and expertise in the form of seminars, curriculum development and mentoring.

Parsons, a California-based engineering management firm, is providing scholarships to undergrads in a cybersecurity honors program at the University of Maryland—College Park. At schools like North Carolina State University—Raleigh and New York’s Fordham University, IBM provides access to case study projects and analytics software to give business and computer science students experience with data mining, predictive analytics and interactive marketing.

The hoped-for result: "What’s going to come out of EPIC is that perfect mesh of highly motivated, very talented engineers who have had hands-on experience," predicts Greg Morris, head of the additive technologies group at GE Aviation in Cincinnati and a member of EPIC’s Industrial Advisory Board. "And those students will be very attractive to companies like GE."

Among them is Hubschman, who upon graduation is joining the Lynn, Massachusetts, office of GE Aviation in an entry-level program that will rotate him through several departments.

At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, an executive from FedEx, JPMorgan Chase or the Kroger Co., among other companies, regularly sits down with undergrads in the business analytics program. Students "get up close and personal with someone who is using data analytics every day," says Frank Guess, a professor in the department.

At industry partner Pershing, Yoakley & Associates Analytics, interns work directly with clients on everything from project planning to selection of mathematical models to implementation and delivery, says Blair Christian, a data scientist at the firm who spends 30 percent of his time at the university teaching business analytics.

Scaling up these sorts of programs is a major goal of the Business-Higher Education Forum, which last year launched a six-year effort to work with business leaders in various regions to identify their needs and get local universities to align education with those needs, says Brian Fitzgerald, the group’s CEO.

[Learn which hot college majors lead to jobs.]

Northeast Natural Energy of Charleston, West Virginia, is working with West Virginia University in Morgantown to create a curriculum in the emerging field of shale energy research, for instance. Case Western Reserve in Cleveland has partnered with Sherwin Williams and power management company Eaton to develop a program on materials and polymer science.

The Milwaukee region, home to more than 150 water technology companies, has become a "global water technology center," says Dean Amhaus, president of the area Water Council. The University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, Marquette University and Gateway Technical College all offer courses that explore the scientific, legal, social, economic and ecological facets of water.

If cybersecurity is your thing, you might head to the University of Maryland–College Park, which has partnered with global security company Northrop Grumman Corp. in launching the Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students, a new cybersecurity honors program. Technical skills are part of the curriculum, but "they will be out of date in five, six, 10 years," says Michel Cukier, director of ACES. "It’s much more important to learn to identify the right problem to solve."