By Emily Halgrimson
Darvell King, 28, and a student at the MTA, was locked up for fi ve years after allegedly watching his cousin kill someone and not reporting it. He realizes it may be hard for him to find a job because of his background but is hoping that someone will give him a chance.
A St. Louis program focuses on manufacturing’s thirst for skilled CNC machine operators to elevate hard-to-place workers.
The Manufacturing Training Alliance (MTA) in St. Louis, Missouri, faces a daunting task — turning minimally skilled workers, ex-felons, and even the homeless into hirable CNC machinists. Although the MTA in St. Louis has been functioning for 10 years, it’s only in the past five the program has made a sizeable contribution to educating the industry’s workforce. Jason Taylor, a recruiter for Aerotek Commercial Staffing Company, says when he first started with Aerotek, he had about a 20 percent success rate with MTA graduates getting hired after the 90-day probationary period. They now have about a 65 percent rate. “It’s very good [quality] now,” he said.
The program, which has led more than 500 new workers through its 16-week advanced manufacturing course, started after a local boy was injured in a drive-by shooting. The community decided that there was a need to work with at-risk youth in the area. “There was a lot of gang activity going on at the time,” said Jonathan Bolden, the vice-president of the MTA’s Education and Training Department. But over the years, with the rise in layoffs, the MTA has started focusing mostly on adults. Some young people still go through the program, but the average age is now about 28.
The MTA shop floor in the old Wagner Electric building on the run-down west side of St. Louis has nine machines in the shop. “We have two different types of mills and a 3-axis Tree-vertical machine. That’s what I like to start with. Then I step them over to the Vertical machining center where they get a chance to deal with automatic tool changers and different types of setup,” said Eddie Welch, the instructor of the advanced manufacturing class and a graduate of the program himself. The shop also includes a 2-axis horizontal lathe the students practice turning parts on.
