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Find Your Future Workforce Through Community Partnerships

Nancy Wilson, CEO, Morrison Container Handling Solutions, Edward Dernulc, Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, and Stephan Girard, Senior Director, Workforce Development, PMMI, acted as community involvement evangelists at the PMMI Annual Meeting.

Nancy Wilson, CEO, Morrison Container Handling Solutions, Edward Dernulc, Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, and Stephan Girard, Senior Director, Workforce Development, PMMI, acted as community involvement evangelists at the PMMI Annual Meeting today in Cincinnati.
Nancy Wilson, CEO, Morrison Container Handling Solutions, Edward Dernulc, Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, and Stephan Girard, Senior Director, Workforce Development, PMMI, acted as community involvement evangelists at the PMMI Annual Meeting today in Cincinnati.

As technical workers become harder to find, it's more important than ever to invest in your future workforce. This can be achieved by connecting with students, parents, and local colleges to raise awareness about careers in packaging and processing.

Recognizing the gap early and alerting colleges of need

Nancy Wilson, CEO, Morrison Container Handling Solutions, Chicago, witnessed the onset of mechatronics and the move away from purely mechanical machinery, and she and her husband was early to see a potential disconnect. They rallied some local Purdue University-Northwest professors to the cause.

“In the early years, you could get an electrical engineer and try to teach them what was happening on the lines mechanically. Or, you could get a mechanical engineer, and try to teach them the controls and electrical side of it. But there wasn’t a pool of people who could do both,” she recalls. “[Morrison President] Nick [Wilson] brought some Purdue University professors to an early PACK EXPO Las Vegas and they immediately saw the gap. They were beaming at realizing a new opportunity for getting their students gainful employment. I think they wrote the mechatronics curriculum on their flight home from PACK EXPO.”

There was a groundswell of local Chicago-are OEM support, including equipment donations totaling more than $1 million. Within two years, Purdue rolled out the first four-year degreed mechatronics programs in the country.

The Wilsons continued work with Purdue University over the years, and notes that most colleges and Universities are hungry to meet the needs of all industry, packaging machine builders included, provided they know what those needs are.

Wilson pledges ongoing support to the development of a skilled workforce in her community in the form of frequent plant tours to dispel negative myths of manufacturing floors. Morrison also relies on sponsorship of robotics competition teams, which Wilson says is a low cost way to make an impact as often students’ needs center more around time and expertise donation, and cash donations might be minimal.

“We’re also trying to help reach guidance counselors and high school teachers, to teach them what it’s like working in manufacturing these days,” she says. “It’s not just feeding our skills pipeline, it’s supporting the entire community.”

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