Episode # 66
Workforce Development in Education with Rich Granger
February 11, 2025
About This Episode
On this week’s episode, we are joined by Rich Granger, the Managing Director of Workforce and Economic Development at Drive Ohio, about how his diverse career path and the importance of workforce development.
Guests
Rich Granger
Rich Granger is Managing Director of Workforce and Economic Development at DriveOhio, an initiative of the Ohio Department of Transportation and the state’s center for smart mobility innovation, on the ground and in the air.
In this role, Rich manages workforce development programs from Pre-K to PhD to prepare Ohio’s talent for transportation jobs of the future. He also supports economic development initiatives across Ohio to help create new jobs in the fast-growing sectors of electric vehicles and advanced air mobility.
Transcript
Kara 0:00
Today’s episode is sponsored by Learning Blade. Middle school is the ideal time for career exploration, with Learning Blade, you can easily integrate STEM and career awareness concepts into your classroom. Find out if this resource is free in your state at learning blade.com. Thanks, learning blade.
Hey. Is this thing on? Are we recording? Can I get a tech person?
Caryn 0:29
Oh, for the love of Ed, tech.
Kara 0:34
Joining us today is Rich Granger, Managing Director of Workforce and Economic Development at drive Ohio, as well as my co host, Matt Gerberick, my colleague at SOITA. So hey to both of you.
Matt 0:48
Hi, Kara,
Rich 0:49
Hello
Kara 0:49
Yeah. So Rich to start us off. Can you tell us just a little bit about how you kind of got involved in the education realm and what led you to your current role with Drive Ohio.
Rich 1:01
For sure. Well, thanks for having me and yeah, it was a very roundabout journey, as many careers tend to be. So I started off in engineering with a slight detour into cartooning and comic strips, and made my way into the world of research and robotics. For the first part of my career, I had studied mechanical engineering at Ohio State, thought about teaching and thought about getting a PhD, and decided to just stop at the master’s degree and get into the world of tech. So I did that work for quite a while. Along the way, went back to school for a business degree and MBA, and started branching into things like marketing and strategy and and, you know, dabbling in the world of startups without joining a startup. You know, a lot of my early career was spent at Patel, a place that does a lot of research and development. And, you know, then I did find my way into teaching. After wrapping some things up at Patel, I went into the university space for a little bit and taught some Capstone engineering for a semester at Ohio State. And then around that time, drive Ohio was being created, and I threw some networking conversations, learned about a position that was focused on workforce development, and decided to jump right in. I’ve been following along with the world of STEM and talking with partners like folks like the past Foundation and others. And I said, Well, here’s a chance to just jump in feet first into the world of workforce development. And that was a little over six years ago, and I’ve been at it ever since
Kara 2:28
Nice. I’m really kind of curious about the cartooning.
Rich 2:31
I couldn’t, couldn’t resist to throw that in there. So it’s,
Kara 2:34
Yeah, that’s so cool.
Rich 2:36
It’s something that started, that started in sixth grade. Well, it started even before that, but it took off in sixth grade because of my sixth grade teacher, who was just fantastic, and he had just a wall full of comics that he had drawn in the classroom, and he just was part of the reading we could do in class and all that. And so from that point on, I was drawing my own comic books at home. Eventually got published, you know, in the plane Cleveland Plain Dealer in the student section and then did a full blown daily comic strip at The Ohio State University lantern when they still had a comics page for a few semesters. Of course, yeah, it’s, it’s, I’m, I’m semi retired from the comics biz, but I still draw, and I still do lots of white boarding in the work that I do, so it’s always there. And yeah, I always try to talk with students about is like, just find the stuff that you enjoy, and it doesn’t feel like working. You blend it all together. And you know, our, you know, working at Ohio Department of Transportation, our, one of our wonderful directors, just retired recently, Dr Marsh banks, and while running the Department of Transportation, he continues to he was doing this while he was full time, and he still does it. He co hosts a Jazz Radio Show in Columbus every Sunday. And so to me, that’s like a great example of you can do all the things that you want to do, and andand enjoy it.
Kara 3:55
Um, can you tell us what is drive Ohio?
Rich 3:58
For sure! So drive Ohio is an initiative within the Ohio Department of Transportation, or ODOT, for some who may have heard of us that way, and so drive Ohio is this team that’s focused on the next generation of transportation technologies. So sometimes we call that smart mobility, but what that means is electric vehicles and charging stations. It means drones for package delivery and bridge inspections and all sorts of other things. We work with these larger electric air taxis. We’ll talk about companies like Joby and beta that are doing work already in Ohio. We work with self driving vehicles and the testing that goes with it, with partners like the Transportation Research Center. We were with connected vehicles that can talk with each other along places like the 33 corridor, working with partners like Honda and others. So it’s all those technologies. We’ve got a team, you know, small team of some engineers that focus on the infrastructure. And although my background is in engineering, my the team I work with is focused on workforce development and preparing. Talent across the state to get ready for these types of technologies and the jobs that go with them.
Matt 5:05
Well, on your on the website, on your the Workforce Development site, did notice there’s an educator tool kit, and just talk a little bit about how you know what, what schools are already involved with that you don’t maybe have to name names, but how they’re using this, and then how people who are interested in and learning more about this can integrate or implement this toolkit in in their classes, and what grades and all that it looks for?
Rich 5:31
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So our drive Ohio educator toolkit, I’ll emphasize 100% free. It’s all our website. Just go to drive.ohio.gov/toolkit that’ll get you started, and you can just do a quick sign up and check it out. So what what you’ll see in there is a whole collection that keeps growing. We’ve like, literally, just in the past few weeks, added two more landing pages within there, one for after school and summer programs, another that’s going live, probably later today, that’s focused on drones and Air Mobility and a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about here. So we’re always tinkering and adding to it. But what this represents is the best collection we’ve been able to assemble of resources that you can use with K 12 students and Career Tech students focused on these technologies I’ve been talking about, and it’s a mixture of curriculum and activities that are standards aligned. These can be used in a classroom, in an after school and a summer program, any or all of the above. It can be used across a variety of grade bands, and we do our best to identify like, what’s best fit for different grade bands. Sometimes an activity is so robust that you can scale it up or down or extend it in different directions for all of K through 12, but then we give guidance on how to split it up across those different grade bands. As far as who’s been using this, I mean, we have definitely seen it all around the state. We were just doing some year end numbers here, and we’ve had over 780 downloads of this toolkit across the state over the past year. That includes at least 120 different after school educators, over 80 different summer program participant you know, educators and leaders, and a lot of those are through referrals now. So you know, we’re excited to see people spreading the word about this. So we’ve been working with a lot of different STEM ecosystems, the do STEM network and folks like that. We collaborate with the Ohio STEM learning network and their statewide activities, the Ohio after school network, so a lot of collaborators to both help get the word out, but also get feedback, because we want this toolkit to be fine tuned for what is most helpful to educators, whether that’s hands on activity with drones, we’ve got webinars and interviews with employers to give their perspective on what it takes to succeed, whether it’s in a career as a drone pilot. We just recently did a we have this toolkit Tuesday webinar series on our website and on our YouTube channel where we talked about the future of airports and an airport design challenge that uses Roblocks and Minecraft and things like that through the FAA, it’s all free. You know, we’ve worked with Lego education and their curriculum. So there’s a lot of partners that we keep adding to our list, and that’s in a nutshell what that toolkit is all about.
Matt 8:21
Rich you mentioned YouTube page and webinars and so forth. Do you also do any kind of in person events for for teachers to come, like a half day workshop, kinds of things or anything like that?
Rich 8:34
We have done those from time to time. And if you know, we can work with regional partners who are interested in maybe co host in something like that, if it helps to have it in a certain region. And then we also have occasionally had things that we host either ourselves or with partners in Columbus that’s more centrally located, where folks can maybe make the trip there, because, yeah, there’s definite value in being in person together. So we support that as often as we can. We’re not a huge team, but that’s why so much of what we publish is online to get started. But the thing I’ll emphasize with everything that we publish is it’s not like take it or leave it, you know, we offer pretty much call it office hours throughout the year. You know, we make it as easy as possible to schedule time with with us, to talk through how you can implement it, how we’ve seen others do it. So if any educators take a look at this toolkit and just feel like, well, I’m not sure where to get started, that’s okay, not a problem. We can just hop on a 30 minute Zoom call with you and just talk it over and give some ideas of at least how others have done it. Because there’s no wrong answer with this
Kara 9:38
Yeah, which is definitely that’s helpful, because sometimes it is trying to envision how it works, if you’ve if you’re just starting out. So that’s great. What are some of the key topics and technologies that are featured in the toolkit?
Rich 9:56
So I’ve mentioned it a few times already, and it’s not the only thing we have, but I’ll talk about. Drones, because everybody loves to talk about drones. I mean, I get in front of an audience of students, hands go up, and the energy level goes up, and everybody loves it. So we’re definitely leaning into that topic. So we’ve got a few examples, so we’ve got the piece of curriculum called the cardboard vertiport challenge. So probably heard of a cardboard challenge. But what the heck is a vertiport? What is that all about? A simple way to say is it’s a drone airport. Where do these things take off and land from? So if you’ve ever seen a helicopter go up, it’s technically taking off and landing from at a heliport. And since these electric air taxis can go vertical, we call it a vertiport. That’s just kind of the nickname for these new types of infrastructure. And so we’ve got students building with whatever materials they can get their hands on to take take a shot at, like, Where would this drone land? And tell me your story. And so then there’s all sorts of, you know, curriculum and resources and videos in there to talk them through. What is this new type of technology? And it’s not imaginary. I mean, you’ve got Kroger was doing drone delivery not so long ago, down in Centerville for about a year or so with company called drone express that built those drones in Dayton, tested them in Springfield before they launched it. With Kroger, headquartered out of Cincinnati, so a very west southwest Ohio story going on there. And then you’ve got different corners of the state. They’re going to have zip line doing drone delivery with health care, with Ohio Health and Cleveland Clinic very soon, the next year or so. So, you know, drones are in the headlines right now and so, but you look up and there’s a lot of things happening in a good way that, in ways that these can help us in our communities. So not only do we have the curriculum to go with that, but then it can layer into tests and certifications and eventually credentials. So middle schoolers can take the FAA trust exam for recreational pilots. It’s online. It’s pretty easy, and that’s a nice thing. You can just kind of hang on the fridge, but it’s also the right thing to do when you’re a recreational pilot, even in your backyard. And that can build up towards the FAA drone pilots license, sometimes called the part 107 is the official name of that. That’s a six point credential in Ohio’s industry recognized credential list. You’re now halfway to 12 points if you were in that credential. And then there are others out there that you know, folks like unmanned Safety Institute USI, offer multiple six point credentials that will get you the rest of the way to graduation requirements. And you can start turning that into a career path, whether it’s a skill that goes on to a construction site, if you’re looking at skilled trades like that, or it could be its own job. You could be an entrepreneur and be a drone pilot. So just with that Air Mobility topic, that’s one example of how we’ve got these kind of layers of things you can learn about. You ask, you know, what are some other technologies we talk? Definitely about electric vehicles, self driving robots, delivery robots, if you go to different college campuses now, you’ll see those things scooting around all over the place. Yeah,
So I was driving through the Ohio State campus not too long ago with my daughter, who’s 10, and we were stopped at a crosswalk. The car in front of me was waiting forever for a robot to cross at the at the crosswalk. Well, this is new, and I kind of said, I’m like, Well, you don’t have to wait for the robot. And I’m turning to my daughter. I never thought I’d say that sentence before, but
Kara 13:24
Yeah, How wild is that?
Rich 13:27
It’s a very 21st century thing, isn’t it? But yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got robot coding activities that folks can use, whether they’ve got Ozobots, spheroes. You know, there’s all sort we’re brand agnostic. We’ll work with anybody, but we’re like the context partner. So we’ll say, Look, if you, if you want to do coding with robots, we can tell you how this is real. We can show you how this is being used in communities across Ohio already, and the jobs that go with it. Because we took, we took a team of students from the Columbus school for girls and for a behind the scenes tour that delivery robot garage at Ohio State. And we put that on our Instagram channel. You can go check that out and see what what the tour looked like. And there are robot technicians. Now that’s not a job that was there even five years ago. So the jobs are popping up everywhere.
Matt 14:18
Rich you mentioned about the the FAA, the trust exam for middle schoolers. I’ve got a seventh grade boy, and you know, it’s he’s always asking about, can I get a drone? Of course, this time of year, it’s a real popular ask. Though, those those certifications, do those deal with, like the size or the the altitude, or what can you? Can you have some insights on what those licenses allow, like a middle school kid to do versus a kid who just unwraps one and takes it out in the yard?
Rich 14:49
Yeah. So, so I would say the distinction between like the trust certificate is what we call recreational so it is going to be sort of more of those small commercial drones you might get, like a. Like a Christmas or birthday present or whatever. And when you get into the part 107 exam, that’s that’s getting into more of the professional pilot. And you, if I’m getting my details right, it’s age 16 and up, can take that part 107 exam, there’s a test prep for that. It’s more rigorous. It’s, it is just a, you know, call it a paper test, or, you know, a digital test. There’s not, like a flying component with the part 107 exam, but that gets into higher altitudes airspace, de confliction, the requirement, you know, like, you may know this already, but if you’re near an airport, the software for, for pretty much any modern drone will lock you out, and you can’t fly into a restricted airspace, and you have to then hit a button to ask for permission, and you may or may not be given permission to fly in certain airspace. So the part 107, gets into a lot of that more detailed work, where the FAA trust is a pretty low barrier to just get started. And it’s that’s where it’s nice to see. And as early as middle school, you can get started on stuff like that.
Matt 16:04
Nice. Yeah, certainly, over here in Dayton, there’s quite a bit of protected airspace. And
Rich 16:10
it’s, it’s an important time we gotta, we gotta manage the airspace properly, and everybody’s gotta follow the same rules. That’s, it’s no different than on the ground. It’s just got a different set of rules in the air. And it, I think it’s interesting, because people aren’t as used to looking up unless they hear like a helicopter or an airplane or something, but when you do look up, there’s a little more up there than there used to be a few years ago, and that’s and we’ve got phones that are able to see things a lot better than they used to, so we’re kind of seeing things that maybe we’re always there, and we just didn’t realize that there’s a little bit of that going on right now.
Kara 16:44
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Caryn 16:50
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Kara 16:53
So you mentioned the the the job that came with the robot repair jobs. So what other kinds of jobs like that? Do you see that are going to, like start popping up with these technologies?
Rich 17:09
Sure. So I’ll give at least two different examples. We’ll start with electric vehicles. A lot of times what we see are new skills that attach to existing jobs. So for example, drive Ohio has a program where we’re in we’re managing the installation of new fast charging EV charging stations across the state. This is through a program called the National Electric Vehicle infrastructure program. So we’re putting these fast charging stations across different highways throughout the state to make sure that every 50 miles, we’ve got coverage for electric vehicles to recharge. One of the new skills that’s popped up with that is the installation of these EV charging stations. So you need skilled electricians who have an additional credential. So this is a little beyond what you might get in in high school, but if you’re in one of those apprentice programs, and eventually you’re in that journey status where you’ve got 8000 hours of experience, you can sit for a new credential called the electric vehicle installation training program. So electricians are now adding that new skill to understand just the nuance of you know, if I’m putting in three phase power at this location, how do I do it safely? What are the other things I need to know about installing electric vehicle charging stations? Then you gotta even think about the maintenance of those as well. So for our skilled electricians out there, there’s always some new twist. And this is one of those examples there. And then we mentioned, we briefly mentioned Joby earlier. So Jovi aviation is a company that’s designing, building, testing and flying these electric air taxis. And for anyone who can just do a Google search for Jovi aviation, check out their YouTube channel. They’ve got some amazing videos that show these things flying around. Picture kind of a three to four passenger aircraft. It’s not a helicopter, because it’s got more than one rotor on it. It’s all electric, incredibly quiet. And so these things are being designed to fly people between, you know, some short hop locations, initially, in places like New York City. If you’re in downtown Manhattan, you want to get to the airport. There is no subway connection. Now, you can hop on one of these things, and it’s up and in the air, and you’re there in about 10 minutes, and it’s quiet, and they’re targeting the cost of a high end Uber for this thing. Why do I Why am I talking about an air taxi in New York City? Because they’re going to build them in Ohio. They’re going to build all of these things at Dayton International Airport. They’ve taken over the old post office building there, and they’re retrofitting it to do subtractive manufacturing. So you want, you want to ask, what’s a new job? Here’s a new job, subtracting manufacturing. Technician. That’s a lot of syllables. What the heck does that even mean? Well, if you’ve heard of 3d printing, that’s additive manufacturing, adding one layer after the other. Subtractive I’ve learned. I didn’t know this right away. A student helped me look this up. Actually, it’s like taking material away. So they’re already doing some of that work for Joby, and then they’re going to be adding the full production line within the next call. It year or two. I’ve seen the latest schedule, and so those are all new jobs, and we have manufacturing jobs around the state, but no one’s ever built an electric air taxi in Ohio, or really anywhere. So that’s a new job that blends some skills from the world of automotive with you’ve got investors like Toyota supporting Joby Uber is an investor as well, but they’re building FAA certified aircraft. So it brings in all those great skills we’ve got throughout the region in aerospace manufacturing. So, so quite a flying car. I don’t know that I would call it that, but it’s that neighborhood of skill.
Matt 20:47
Yeah. And I know just recently, I think Joby just was awarded a new permission or license or certification through the FAA to to go beyond what they’ve been testing. And so that’s, that’s super cool. It’s right here in our backyard, you bet.
Rich 21:05
Yeah, the the FAA, it’s, you’re absolutely right. They keep knocking down all these different certifications and requirements. And then for the entire industry, the FAA announced a whole new category of aircraft. And for anyone that likes to geek out on aviation history, the last time that happened was in the 1940s with helicopters. I mean, they call it vertical lift, and it’s a whole new category of aircraft, because these things are so different that they had to create that category to make sure they had all the all the details lined up on pilot training and everything else. So it’s definitely interesting times. For sure,
Matt 21:40
What are your goals? Or what are the what’s the vision for this in, say, 10 to 20 years? How? How do you see this being more, you know, available to people, or what do you think this could look like?
Rich 21:54
So I’ll absolutely get to your question about looking 10 to 20 years ahead, but we also like to look back 100 plus years, because we just a few days ago, celebrated Wright Brothers day, when they, you know, set, set the record for flight. But we always talk about all the things that happened before and after that famous day, because it all happened in Dayton, right? They designed, built, tested before their short vacation in North Carolina, and then they built the whole business in Dayton, and the legacy of that is Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the largest single site employer in the state of Ohio today. So I love to bring up those history examples, because you look at those black and white pictures and you see, oh, that looks so, you know, old fashioned, or what is that? But at the time, to your point, it was, it was brand new, it was cutting edge. And so what? Where are we headed with this stuff in the next 10 or 20 years? You know, when will air taxi service come to Ohio? We’re not totally sure. I mean, that’s just like, you know, transit and other, you know, train travel. There’s population densities you gotta look at and figure out which modes make the most sense for each region. But for healthcare delivery, it’s already starting to happen. I mentioned zip line with the smaller drones. They call those things droids. They launch about the side of a building. I mean, I’m not exaggerating. That’s what these things work. Crazy, right? And so, but those, those have already been tested overseas, in in countries like Africa and other places, more in open rural areas, but now we’re bringing it into urban areas. So you’re going to see more of these drone delivery services for health care and other things like that, and even with these larger electric air taxis I’ve mentioned briefly, another company called beta technologies. They’re also on the ground in Ohio, in Springfield, at the airport and at Akron Canton airport. They have charging stations for their aircraft at both of those locations. They have flown through Ohio multiple times with their aircraft. They’re looking at healthcare logistics delivery, whether it’s organ donations and other things you know you think about critical care, supplies that need to move quickly. These electric aircraft, they’re pennies on the hundreds of dollars. When you could look at the cost of jet fuel compared to charging an electric aircraft, the cost difference is insanely low. So you’re going to see sooner than later, the healthcare industry, in particular, I think, swinging towards these technologies, because it’s costs for healthcare aren’t going down, and anything they can do to be not just cost effective but but just as safe and more efficient they’re going to do that? Sure?
Kara 24:25
Yeah, this is wild to me, and I’m also thinking too, like of in the future, like congestion, like, are we going to run into issues like you do on interstates, where there’s backup and, you know, like tons of traffic, and
Rich 24:47
It’s a question with it’s definitely something we have to think about. And so we’ve been working air traffic management this whole time that this technology has been developing one of the, one of the key pieces of tech. Technology we’re using is located at Springfield airport. I’ve mentioned Springfield a few times here. That’s one of our big hubs in the state for research and development in this area. So the Springfield airport also has an Air National Guard Base adjacent to it. They run some of the Air Force drone operations out of that facility. And so we have a system called Sky vision, not to be confused with Skynet. So we’re not talking about that stuff, right? Sci Fi fans out there, but sky vision is is using FAA radars to do air traffic, airspace management. So we’re tracking what’s up there using today’s FAA technology, and we’re not publishing that feed back out to all air traffic controllers, because they’d see all these extra dots, and they said, What is this stuff? But that’s what we’re heading towards. Is right now they have a test zone, and this was developed between ODOT and the Air Force Research Lab, so a state and federal collaboration, and so that testing equipment has been used for multiple years now, and you can say that’s one of the reasons why companies like Joby and beta are here. The Air Force has had an ongoing program called agility prime test all this out and to get the supply chain built out in the United States for national security and commercial reasons, to have all that here in the US. So it’s, we’re thinking about it, and we’ve done visits with students that talk about floating traffic signals. And I’m like, Well, maybe we’re maybe we’ll get there, I don’t know. We’ll find out
Kara 26:33
T hat’s so crazy. It’s wild to think about. That’s wild
Rich 26:38
Well, and the most fun about all this is, you know, a lot of these challenges and opportunities we’re talking about, you talk about 10 or 20 years, and I know I’m preaching at the choir here. I mean, middle school students are the ones that are going to own those solutions when they get out into into, you know, whatever their journey takes them after high school. So we tell that to students all the time, whether they’re in high school or younger, especially the youngest ones, we say, Look, these are your problems to solve, whether it’s figuring out the next generation of battery technology. You mentioned the Honda battery facility earlier. I mean, that’s a huge opportunity down there. And we’re using the most simplistic batteries you’re ever going to see in your lifetime right now, because batteries are only going to get better, they’re going to charge faster. They’re going to use different types of chemistries in the future. So, you know, another example of what skills we need. We need battery engineers. We need a lot of them. And so that means, do you like chemistry? Do you like baking? Because baking is chemistry, right? We need a lot of battery chefs out there, you know, and battery doctors who can tell us the health of a battery system, you know. So, you know, when we talk about career opportunities with students, we like to start with what’s familiar. You know, I want to be a chef. I want to be a doctor, all right. Well, do you like using phones and iPads? Probably, well, did you know, there’s a battery in there. You could be the battery chef or the battery doctor. You know, there’s a lot of ways we can start that conversation, because we need a lot of that help. This is a 21st century challenge that isn’t done yet.
Matt 28:10
All the opportunities, all the opportunities, yes, for kids, yeah, yeah. Need to make sure we’re getting those out there to teachers and students and parents, you know, for for kids who are, you know, undecided or trying to figure out, you know, well, I don’t know what I want to do. They likely don’t even know what there is to do. So just hearing these things and with the toolkit, being able to, you know, expose them to what opportunities there are that that fit into those like you’re talking about, like, you know, cooking or baking and so forth. It’s like, well, we’re not going to eat this, but it’s the same kind of thinking, in the same way of of problem solving. And I think that’s really exciting. And would would get most, if not any, kids, blood pumping about, Oh, wow. That is really cool stuff. It gets mine.
Rich 28:59
Absolutely and I mean, if you like taking things apart or putting things back together, working with your hands. I mean, there is so much going on with manufacturing. We’ve talked about the Joby manufacturing opportunities. There’s the Honda battery stuff. I mean, you could even branch off into Intel. We don’t do that work directly. But what’s fascinating about modern manufacturing is, it’s just so different than it was even 10 years ago, let alone 2030, years ago, that maybe some people’s reference points, you know, we talk with some of the community colleges that are doing boot camps to get students ready to go work in the manufacturing industry and these things, a lot of these facilities are like clean rooms, so you’ve got like, a white suit on you’re working with high tech equipment. And what really you want to talk about mind blowing one of the one of the manufacturing boot camps right now, it’s getting people ready for three different possible career pathways. I’m going to list them, and I would have never combined these together, but they all are using this. Same skills. It’s, it’s semiconductors, you know, like Intel, the chips. It’s bio manufacturing, I’d have to do a little research to tell you more about what that even is. And it’s battery manufacturing. All three of those things use a lot of the same environments and and they’re, they’re well paying jobs, and they’re high tech, and sometimes you can start these jobs right out of high school with the you know, or maybe get get yourself a two year degree or something like that, and now you’re working in a high tech manufacturing facility, maybe right in your own backyard. It’s crazy how many of these jobs are coming and how I’ve described three totally seemingly unrelated industries, and yet, with the same boot camp, you can get yourself ready to go into any of those so that you know anything that I’m telling you about manufacturing, I have learned from our collaboration with the Ohio Manufacturers Association, which is a wonderful partner. They’ve got awesome workforce resources. Check out the making Ohio website. They’ve got, they just relaunched it with some great content for educators. Anyone who wants to explore manufacturing careers, check out the making Ohio website. And if you love to geek out on skills mapping to curriculum, you should also check out the Ohio manufacturing competency model. All of these are linked through our toolkit because we’re always cross referencing good stuff that’s out there, but that manufacturing competency model, they interviewed all these different employers and figured out, What skills does it take to succeed in manufacturing? And guess what? 60 to 80% of the skills you need cut across all sorts of different industries, automotive, aerospace, defense, semiconductor, batteries, you name it. So with the with one set of training, you’re now empowered to go work at all sorts of different manufacturing sites, and you get that last little bit on the job training, maybe from that that employer. But there’s a lot of opportunities now and into the future with manufacturing in Ohio. If you’re fascinated with this type of tech, I’d encourage checking it out.
Matt 32:03
Yeah, yeah, that’s, you know, I heard the similar message from some some manufacture, some folks in manufacturing, at an event about a year ago, and and someone asked, like, what are the things you need kids to be able to do? And it was like, show up. Soft skills. Get along with each I mean things that, you know, we do cross over everything. They mentioned knowledge of AI and coding and the current technologies and being able to be flexible and and, you know, learn new things. But then they said, You will, we’ll take care of the details you just get, so that they’re ready for us to work with. And so I think that sounds a lot like what, what you’re just echoing, also,
Rich 32:49
You bet. And there’s, I mean, there are programs like the high school tech Internship Program, where the state of Ohio will pay employers to hire high school students. And there are often intermediaries in the in each region that will be the employer record if the employer can’t sign them up. So there are plenty of ways for students to get a running start into their career, whether that’s in manufacturing or engineering or any other field. Definitely check those resources out. Too
Matt 33:17
Cool.
Kara 33:18
Yeah, that’s really cool. Thank you for such a great conversation,
Rich 33:22
For sure.
Caryn 33:24
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope you found our discussion interesting and insightful. Don’t forget to check out the show notes on our website, where you’ll find more information about today’s guest resources we mentioned and information on earning contact hours for listening.
Kara 33:39
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with your network and check us out at for the love of edtech.org, this podcast is produced by SOITA, the Southwestern Ohio Instructional Technology Association, in partnership with ThinkTV and CET, the local PBS stations in Dayton and Cincinnati. Until next time, keep exploring new ways to empower your students through tech, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.