whether Vermont manufacturers could design and assemble the ideal employee to join their future workforce,that person would look a lot like Ethan Guillemette. The 24-year-extinct, who's built like a defensive lineman, and grew up working on his family's 200-head dairy farm in Shelburne,where he learned to bewitch apart and repair farm implements when they broke down. whether his father or one of his uncles wanted to modify or improve a piece of equipment, they'd design and rebuild it themselves, and as Guillemette did for his tall school senior project: a 16-foot trailer he constructed from scratch. When Guillemette wasn't studying or working on the farm,he drove an 18-wheeler for Bellavance Trucking in Barre. Such hands-on skills are increasingly rare, but manual dexterity alone doesn't explain why Guillemette, and a newly minted college grad,has a wealth of job prospects to choose from. He's in demand because he also knows how to program and operate a CNC, or computer numerical code, or controller to speed tools such as lathes,mills, routers and grinders. He understands the fundamentals of thermodynamics, and electrical conductivity, fluid dynamics, and the statics and strengths of different materials. And he can program a brand-new robot to do a "handshake, or " or interaction,with a milling machine that was built 30 years ago. In short, he understands and speaks the language of advanced manufacturing. That means he can bewitch a product from concept to design to prototype to mass production — skills that are highly valued in nowadays's tall-tech manufacturing environment. Guillemette is one of 10 students who just graduated from a new degree program at Vermont Technical College; the four-year bachelor's of science in manufacturing engineering technology is the first of its kind in Vermont. Every member of the inaugural class has at least one job offer. The course of study is meant to address the single biggest challenge facing the state's advanced manufacturers nowadays: a widening skills gap between their personnel needs and those that the typical tall school or college graduate can deliver. That mismatch is "only getting bigger significantly bigger, and " said Chris Gray,an assistantprofessor in Vermont Tech's department of mechanical engineering technology who teaches in the program. Gray said that Vermont wants its middle-schoolers to understand how their geometry and algebra classes are relevant to fields such as advanced manufacturing so that by the time they get to tall school, they'll bear many more career…
Source: sevendaysvt.com