Milacron partners in manufacturing academy

Batavia, Ohio-based machine builder Milacron has established the Advanced Manufacturing Academy with the Grant Career Center in nearby Bethel, Ohio, to put the plastics industry on the career radar of tech-minded high school students.

Milacron donated a Q-55 Series injection molding machine and rigging, the salary of the main instructor, and the time and support of a curriculum team to launch the program.

An operating company of Hillenbrand Inc., Milacron also manufactures extrusion systems and auxiliary equipment for the automotive, construction, medical, telecommunications, material handling and packaging markets.

Milacron employs 1,900 people worldwide, and many plan to retire in upcoming years. The AMA is a way to reach out to the next generation of skilled workers.

Fourteen high school seniors signed up for the AMA, which sets a tuition-free training path to employment opportunities in advanced manufacturing without requiring students to leave the Bethel campus except on a few occasions.

Milacron had already been partnering with the Grant Career Center for about a decade, opening its doors to plant tours and offering job shadowing to students from several school districts. When some lab space at the center opened up, Milacron officials jumped at the chance to get further involved and the AMA was formed.

Between its Batavia headquarters facility and a manufacturing site in Mount Orab, Milacron employs nearly 1,000 people in the area, including construction and welding tradespeople, machining experts and engineers.

Many of the company's employees are approaching retirement — some with 40-50 years of service to Milacron. In August, three employees with a collective tenure of more than 150 years of manufacturing experience retired.

The AMA is an example of how Milacron is trying to close the skilled labor gap and build up a talent pipeline, according to Lindsay Niedzwiedski, the machine builders' lead enterprise leader.

The program is in line with Milacron's core value to "partner with possibility," Niedzwiedski added, pointing to proximity and timing as big factors in making the partnership possible.

The Grant Career Center is about 15 minutes from not only Milacron's global headquarters and manufacturing facility in Batavia but also a secondary manufacturing facility in Mount Orab in the neighboring county that produces screws and barrels for its machines.

Milacron has long been tapping the career and technical school for prospective hires. They saw an opportunity to make a more focused appeal after learning Grant officials were discontinuing an auto collision lab program with the retirement of the instructor at the close of the 2021-22 academic year.

"Given our long-standing community partnership with the institution, a partnership expansion with sponsorship of a yearlong program there with potential to hire these students upon graduation was a win-win in our book," Niedzwiedski said in an email. "AMA was developed to use that vacated lab space to provide year-round, real-world work experience for registered seniors who apply."

Tuition is free for students currently registered in existing Grant programs that align with manufacturing, including information technology, engineering, metal fabrication, construction and auto technology. The school day begins at 7:45 a.m. and ends at 2:25 p.m. with about two and a half hours each day spent in a hands-on lab and related classroom theory. The students follow the curriculum in their core program of study and also take on manufacturing-based classwork and hands-on lab work with the Q-55 machine.

According to the Clermont Country Chamber of Commerce, no other technical school in the state of Ohio has an in-house company-sponsored program of this kind.

To fill the openings, the inaugural AMA class received information about the new offering at the end of their junior year and again over the summer. The program includes visits to the Milacron headquarters site and work on what is called a capstone project.

"The end goal of the project is to produce the golf tees that will be used as giveaways for the school's annual golf outing to raise scholarship funds for students," Niedzwiedski said.

The project will cover light assembly on the machine, run-off tests ahead of operation, processing plastic golf tees and packaging the giveaway for the event.

"The tasks the students will perform are similar to tasks that are done in our manufacturing and field service operations," Niedzwiedski said.

The main instructor and an instruction support team — all from Milacron — prepared the curriculum while Grant Career Center staff handle the day-to-day school schedule and educational requirements.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony held Oct. 20 brought together students, educators and representatives of Milacron, local and state government agencies and the Clermont County Chamber of Commerce.

"Our purpose at Milacron, to shape what matters for tomorrow, is executed with intention through our Grant Career Center partnership," Milacron President Mac Jones said at the event. "You, the AMA students, are the Milacron employees that will shape our plastics processing of the future."