WESTFIELD (WWLP) – You might not know it, but manufacturing is a huge industry in western Massachusetts and the industry is advancing – fast.
Westfield News media partner 22News recently toured Advance Manufacturing in Westfield. It’s certainly not the original, small, greasy, dark shops of 50 years ago. In fact, they’re working on projects so massive and secretive, we weren’t allowed to photograph them. Jeff Amanti of Advance Technology said it’s now a very clean, high-tech, highly skilled industry. “A ton of knowledge is required to run these machines. This is a million dollar machine behind us and you just can’t come in off the street and run a machine like this. It takes years and years of training,” Amanti said, pointing to a large machine.
Business is booming, but there is a skills gap. Not many people are trained to fill the jobs available. At one time, there were many students learning manufacturing, but that changed when there was a push for students to attend college.
At Westfield Technical Academy, students learn the high-tech skills that are so desperately needed in the manufacturing industry right now. One week, they’re in the classroom learning the fundamentals. The next week, they’re out getting paid on a job to practice those skills. E students on co-op can get paid close to $20 an hour before graduating high school. They’re often offered jobs to stay at the company where they worked in high school.
Massachusetts is one of a few states working to change the perception of manufacturing from a “shop class” that students took if they didn’t have a future at a university, to a skilled industry that offers a diploma and skill set by graduation. Part of the new approach is incorporating math and other school fundamentals into industry learning.
“I’ll take a blueprint and say ‘you need to figure out these coordinates. Here’s your right triangle. Here’s why you need to be able to figure that out’, so it becomes applicable, so that they adhere to that a little bit better than just the abstract concepts of algebra,” said Gary Nadeau, lead teacher of manufacturing technology at Westfield Tech.
Other technical school graduates do continue on to college where they earn degrees in fields like engineering. That way, they learn further the concepts and application of those lessons in the real world.
