Washington Business Summer 2017 | Washington Business | Page 39

business backgrounder | education & workforce
Everyone stands to gain from what some call the worksite
learning internship program. Students without immediate
college plans discover new job and career possibilities while
earning both high school and college credits. Manufacturers
draw potential employees while connecting to broader
networks of family and friends to dispel old beliefs that
manufacturing is a dirty, undesirable profession.
“We have this history of thinking of those as bad jobs.
They’re actually good jobs,” said Scott Culbertson, a math
instructor at Hayes Freedom High School in the Camas
School District, which this year launched an internship
program with WaferTech. “They give students a pathway
for success, and they don’t have to incur a lot of debt.”
The Evergreen and Camas school districts have established
programs with local manufacturers SEH America, Karcher,
WaferTech, and Columbia Machine. The Vancouver Public
Schools will launch manufacturing internships next school
year and new companies including Silicon Forest Electronics,
Frito Lay, and Kyocera are coming on board.
The program’s growth has an organic, bottom-up feel,
with districts and employers adapting to satisfy the needs of
students within the resource constraints of businesses. The
programs include a total of 90 hours of training at school and/
or at the job site, although some districts are now offering a
“remote” classroom version with fewer worksite hours due
to logistics issues or restrictions on access to a worksite.
The interns aren’t assigned make-work tasks, nor are
they taking on duties of paid employees. Rather, their
learning begins with how to apply for jobs and extends into
the fundamentals of Lean manufacturing, statistical product
control and safety using the online Certified Production
Technician curriculum. Employers typically assign interns
“We think it is replicable in any community that has
industry and is interested in workforce development.”
— Ted Feller, executive director, Southwest Washington STEM Network
to work on real problems or look for inefficiencies in
their manufacturing operations and ask them to offer
possible solutions. It’s not uncommon for the employers to
implement the intern recommendations.
Ted Feller, executive director of the Southwest
Washington STEM Network, believes the fast-growing
program can be a model for other communities.
“We think it is replicable in any community that has
industry and is interested in workforce development,” he
said. Regardless of the types of businesses in a community,
“the constant is that the need for 21st Century skill
development is universal to industry and the need for job
readiness is universal to youth.”
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