New Effort to Match Veterans With Manufacturing Jobs and Training

In an ambitious effort to match unemployed veterans with manufacturing jobs, and match veterans who need training with appropriate programs, a partnership of major manufacturers (GE, Alcoa, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and others) and technical and community colleges have created Get Skills to Work. The first goal is to get 15,000 veterans matched/trained for jobs in these firms and others.  Ultimately, they are aiming for over 100,000.  The coalition will start in the Cincinnati area January at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, and go to nine other cities further in 2013.  You may want to check out the website to see when and where you can sign up to participate in the program.

However, there’s stuff you can use on the website right now.  Go to the bottom of the page and find resources for veterans, where you can search for open positions at the Manufacturing Pipeline.  You can put in the location, and radius, and a military operation or job keyword (like manufacturing), and it will pull up positions that have been posted. 

You can also go to the Career Assessment area, in which you answer 14 questions that help you sort out your aptitudes and interests.  You are then presented with some career options, for which you can get information on pay levels and skills and training required, and jobs that are currently open. 

The third part involves the creation of “badges”—the matching of military occupation codes and civilian career skills and creating certification for those skills.  Create an account, upload your resume (or create one with their resume builder), and they will email you with notification if any of your skill sets match, and you are awarded a certification badge. 

In the “education” section, you can put in a career you would like to train for, your city and state, and the level of education you’d like to get, and it will spit out a list of institutions that provide it, as well as links to their financial aid information and other information about the school. 

There’s also a “community” section with discussion forums.    The resources page is pretty much a policy paper section for the National Association of Manufacturers, a major partner of the coalition.  And hey, in all of this, you only get *some* intrusive electioneering ads from the National Association of Manufacturers, who tell you to vote for the Good Guys and against the Bums That Are Destroying America.  Ah, but that’s why God made the “x” in the upper right hand corner.