The Monthly Workforce Newsletter of the Council of Industry
February 1, 2024
|
|
Last Chance! Nominate a 2024 Manufacturing Champion Today
|
|
The Council of Industry's Manufacturing Champions Award is presented annually to individuals and/or organizations that “Through vision, dedication and tireless involvement have worked to overcome some of the many obstacles faced by manufacturers in the Hudson Valley and in so doing they have made it possible for manufacturers and their employees to prosper.” This year’s awards will be presented at the Champion's Breakfast and Workforce Developers Expo April 26 th at The Villa in Middletown. Past Champions include owners of manufacturing businesses, key employees, teachers and educators, economic development leaders, educational institutions, economic development organizations elected officials and agencies supporting the manufacturing workforce pipeline. Follow the link below for a list of past champions.
|
|
Manufacturing Intermediary Apprentice Program (MIAP) - What Trades are Available for Your Employees?
|
|
One of the first steps in the process of enrolling your employees into the Council of Industry’s apprentice program is matching those employees to the appropriate trade. The Council of Industry Directly offers 6 trades, however, through our MIAP partners we can easily access additional trades on your behalf. Further, because we are a program sponsor with the Department of Labor, we have the option to add any of the dozens of manufacturing related trades they have approved.
Council sponsored trades are:
For the most part these trades are time based, lasting between 18 months and 4 years of full-time employment (though previous credit for candidates who have on the job experience can shorten that time). For a list of the other available trades, including Welder, Mold-Maker, Metal Stamping Press Operator and CNC Took Cutter & Grinder follow the link below.
|
|
Registration Open for Spring 2024 (In Person) Certificate in Manufacturing Leadership Program
|
|
The Council of Industry’s Certificate in Manufacturing Leadership program offers attendees a range of leadership skills through a series of concentrated courses.
- Fundamentals of Leadership – February 28 & March 6th
- Problem Solving & Decision Making – March 19 or 20 (To be confirmed)
- Environmental Health & Safety Essential – April 3
- Effective Business Communication – April 17
- Human Resources Management Issues – May 8
- Making a Profit in Manufacturing – May 22
- Best Practices & Continuous Improvement – June 5
- Positive Discipline & Motivation – June 11
|
|
New York State DOL Releases Draft ‘Combined’ Plan for Public Comment
|
|
Under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), the Governor of each State must submit a Unified or Combined State Plan to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor that outlines a four-year strategy for the State’s workforce development system. The publicly-funded workforce development system is a national network of Federal, State, regional, and local agencies and organizations that provide a range of employment, education, training, and related services and supports to help all job-seekers secure good jobs while providing businesses with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy.
WIOA requires States to plan across core programs and include this planning process in the Unified or Combined State Plans. The idea is to promote a shared understanding of the workforce needs within each State and foster development of more comprehensive and integrated approaches, such as career pathways and sector strategies, for addressing the needs of businesses and workers. Successful implementation of many of these approaches called for within WIOA requires robust relationships across programs. Comments are accepted until February 7th.
|
|
Periodically the Council of Industry will share profiles of individuals who have applied for, or expressed an interest in, a job in Hudson Valley manufacturing.
Other Council members can contact Johnnieanne Hansen directly for additional candidate details or to learn more about the recruiting initiative.
|
|
Position Interest: Systems Analyst, IT, Engineering
Education: Bachelor of Engineering: Computer Engineering
Level: Entry-level, Mid-Level
Summary: This candidate is an experienced engineering intern / software developer. With a handful of years in the healthcare industry, this candidate has most recently worked for the manufacturing industry in their warehouse. Fluent in multiple coding languages as well as competent in circuit analysis, creates an extremely well rounded software engineer. Currently residing in Poughkeepsie, NY. This candidate is actively searching for a new role to grow their skills with a local manufacturing company. If you have a role open relevant to their work experience, I encourage you to reach out.
|
|
Position Interest: Maintenance, Electrical, General Manufacturing
Education: United States Navy (BUDS Training, Naval Firefighting, & Aircrew Survival), High School
Level: Mid-Level
Summary: This candidate is a seasoned professional in the maintenance and general trades fields. An accomplished US Navy veteran, this candidate is looking for opportunities related to his skills in the manufacturing industry. With roughly 4 years of experience as an equipmentman, responsible for inspection, maintenance and troubleshooting for a variety of flight related equipment. As well as 6 years of parts / maintenance experience at IBM in Fishkill. Has created an individual with an impressive attention to detail and project management ability. If you are looking for an individual with this experience, please feel free to reach out directly.
|
|
Position Interest: Industrial Engineering (Product, Design, Electrical)
Education: Bachelor of Science – Integrated Science & Technology (Concentration in Industrial Engineering, Operations / Supply Chain Management)
Level: Mid-level
Summary: This candidate is extremely well-versed in a variety of engineering software, tools, and methodologies. After completing their bachelor’s with a concentration in industrial engineering / operations, they have completed a handful of years in the operations, production, and manufacturing sector. Paired with their certifications in AS9100 and Lean Six Sigma, has created an individual with a high attention to detail. Able to spot inefficiencies within an organization and implement changes to correct them. This candidate currently resides in Roslyn, NY, and is open to relocation. If you need a candidate with a combined background in operations as well as engineering, please feel free to reach out.
|
|
Position Interest: Engineering – Project / Design, Internship
Education: Bachelor of Science – Mechanical Engineering (Ant. May 2025)
Level: Entry-level
Summary: This candidate is a college student with an anticipated graduation date of May 2025. This candidate excels in environments that require technical and fundamental abilities. While completing high school, this candidate was enrolled in the Pine Bush Engineering Excelsior Academy. Receiving their HAAS CNC Certification while in school, he has completed projects on CNC Mill, AUTOCAD, Makerbot 3D printers and a water jet cutter. Looking for an internship while on break from college. This candidate currently resides in Montgomery, NY and is open to interviews. If you are interested in a soon-to-be Engineering graduate, please feel free to reach out.
|
|
Position Interest: Administrative Assistant
Education: Associates Degree - Fashion Merchandising
Level: Experienced
Summary: This candidate is a highly qualified administrative assistant with over 20 years specifically in the Wallkill School District. Extremely adept in all facets of office management including scheduling, auditing and Microsoft office. With experience in quality assurance has created an incredibly well-rounded candidate that is able to conquer tasks timely as well as efficiently. They currently reside in Poughkeepsie NY and are actively interviewing. If you are looking for an experienced administrative assistant, please feel free to reach out.
|
|
News for HR and Workforce Professionals
|
|
The End of Workplace Loyalty – Can it Be Regained?
|
|
Business Insider’s Aki Ito writes “In the two years I've been writing about Americans' changing relationship to work, there's one theme that's come up over and over again: loyalty. Whether my stories are about quiet quitting, or job-hopping, or leveraging a job offer from a competitor to force your boss to give you a raise, readers seem to divide into two groups. On one side are the bosses and tenured employees, the boomers and Gen Xers. Kids these days, they gripe. Do they have no loyalty? On the other side are the younger rank-and-file employees, the millennials and Gen Zers, who feel equally aggrieved. Why should I be loyal to my company when my company isn't loyal to me?”
It turns out there's a whole body of research around these questions. It focuses on what organizational psychologists call the psychological contract — the set of things that employees and employers believe they owe each other and are owed in return.
|
|
More Workers Want to Change Jobs but Now Face Tougher Odds
|
|
Millions of workers switched jobs during the past couple of years, enticed by abundant openings and big pay raises from companies desperate to hire. The market for salaried, white-collar jobs has since cooled, but workers’ itchiness to find new work hasn’t. Roughly 85% of 1,000 U.S. professionals polled in a new LinkedIn survey say they are thinking about changing jobs this year, up from 67% a year earlier. While the market for hourly jobs remains robust, the number of listings for finance, marketing, software development and other white-collar fields has fallen below prepandemic levels, according to data from the jobs site Indeed. On LinkedIn, one job opening is available for every two applicants. A year ago, jobs outnumbered applicants two to one.
Those who are actually job hunting—versus those who might be venting their work frustrations—are discovering that they have less leverage than in the recent past. Companies are offering new hires less-generous pay and flexibility than they did a year or two ago, data from job boards suggest. They are also holding the line in negotiations over perks such as additional vacation time, applicants say.
|
|
Fortune 500 C-Suite Snapshot – The Shifting Profiles of Corporate Leadership
|
|
In an increasingly complex and challenging environment, more is being asked of CEOs, and they need a robust team around them to enhance their leadership, support their success and address gaps in their skills or knowledge. The collective intelligence provided by a strong team can help CEOs anticipate and respond to risks and opportunities, enabling them to sort through vast amounts of information to create — and deliver on — their strategies.
How are the leadership teams of Fortune 500 companies evolving in response to the changing demands? To begin to answer this question, we mapped leader profiles for 11 roles commonly included in the C-suite to develop a snapshot of executives in these positions. We will continue to track this data annually to gain a better understanding of shifts in leader profiles over time. Here are a few observations from this year’s analysis:
|
|
New York Budget Bill: COVID Leave Ending, Other Leaves Coming?
|
|
The Governor’s Budget Briefing Book notes proposed legislation in budget would “sunset” the law which required employers to provide sick leave and other benefits for employees subject to a mandatory or precautionary order of quarantine or isolation due to COVID-19 law because its applicability to new employers is unclear and quarantine requirements have changed.” If passed, New York’s COVID Sick Leave Law would be repealed as of July 31, 2024.
Unlike employers’ other sick leave obligations, the COVID Sick Leave Law requires paid days exclusively for COVID-related issues. If the law is repealed, employers’ COVID-19 leave obligations would fall more in line with other illnesses, such as influenza or seasonal colds. Private-sector businesses are still required to provide paid leave for such conditions under New York’s other “Paid Sick Leave Law,” which requires up to 40 or 56 hours of paid leave per year for basic illnesses and medical visits. Another COVID-era requirement, the COVID Vaccination Leave Law that required four hours of paid leave for employees to get COVID vaccinations, expired on December 31, 2023.
|
|
Is Skilled-Based Education the Trend for 2024?
|
|
The topic of much discussion over the past few years, skills-based learning, is becoming more desirable. Both the academic world and the business world have voiced their opinions on this topic. On the academic side a recent report from the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, which is a network of colleges and university, found that 86% of the respondents said there is a need for academic programs to build specific skills. However, only 22% said their institutions had implemented a campuswide competency-based framework.
On the business side skills are moving up on the criterion for hiring as well. In 2022, a study from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 79% of companies say scores on skills assessments are just as or more important than traditional criteria in hiring decisions. So how are companies addressing these issues? A report, 2024 Global Learning & Skills Trends Report, from Udemy, an online skills marketplace and education platform, looked at how 15,000 business customers are investing in this training.
|
|
Ways to Strengthen the Role of Your Middle Managers
|
|
Middle managers are critical to every business, yet their roles are often unclear, and their training may come last, if at all. And now, in our hybrid world, the role of the manager is changing again. It’s never been more important that companies recognize the critical role their managers play and provide training that aligns with the world we work in today. Zahira Jaser, a professor and editor, writes in an HBR article based on two decades of research, managers are likely to “increasingly become channels for relationships, influence and connection.”
To better set up managers for success in leading the business, they should be expected to: Connect work to strategy. Know how the company works. Managers need to understand the industry, business, customers and the forces in the market that require reaction. As leaders of teams managers build a healthy, high-performing team environment.
|
|
The Americans with Disabilities Act: Does Your Website Need to Comply? -By Adam Rodriguez, Esq. Bleakley Platt
|
|
Should you care if your business’ website is ADA compliant?
Absolutely. Litigating a website accessibility case can be expensive, even if you are ultimately successful on the merits. This is particularly true because the ADA provides for an award of attorneys’ fees to a prevailing party. It may be best to proactively address your website’s accessibility to ensure meaningful access for persons with disabilities. But, if you are sued, there are strong arguments that can be marshalled to defeat the claim or negotiate a favorable settlement. The lawyers at Bleakley Platt can help.
What does the ADA say?
The ADA states that “[n]o individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases . . . or operates a place of public accommodation.” 42 U.S.C. § 12182(a). The statute provides several examples of public accommodations, all of which are physical places, including an inn, a restaurant, a movie theater, etc. 42 U.S.C. § 12181(7).
Does the phrase “place of public accommodation” include your website?
Unfortunately, the answer may depend on what court you are in.
|
|
Workers Voice Interest in Work-life Balance, Belonging Over Climbing the Corporate Ladder
|
|
Although 56% of workers worldwide consider themselves to be ambitious, 47% say they’re not focused on progression or climbing the ladder at their jobs, according to Randstad’s Jan. 17 Workmonitor report. A new sense of “ambition” is emerging, the report authors noted, which emphasizes work-life balance, flexibility, equity, belonging and upskilling at the heart of workers’ career decisions.
in a survey of 27,000 workers worldwide, 47% said they’re willing to stay in a role they like, even if there’s no room to progress or develop. In addition, 34% said they never want to take on a managerial role. Instead, workers are more likely to value work-life balance (93%), schedule flexibility (81%) and mental health support (83%) over career ambition (70%). In addition, 72% of employees noted the importance of training and development opportunities. Nearly a third said they’d quit a job if they weren’t offered opportunities to “future-proof” their skills, such as training around AI.
|
|
Mental Wellness in the 2024 Workplace
|
|
Employers are recognizing that focusing on mental wellbeing in the workplace not only enhances employee health but increases productivity and contributes to the wellbeing of the community at large. Mental health conditions cost employers more than $100 billion and 217 million lost workdays annually, according to the National Association on Mental Illness (NAMI). While mental health services are increasingly included in workplace insurance packages, the extent of mental health coverage can vary significantly from one organization to another.
Some employers may provide comprehensive mental health benefits, including therapy sessions, counseling and psychiatric consultations, as part of their health insurance plans. Others may offer more limited coverage or may not include mental health services in their insurance packages at all. Access to 24/7 mental health hotlines, apps for meditation and mindfulness (such as Calm or Iona Mind) and programs focused on building resilience and creating coping strategies will become standard practices in a wellness-focused workplace.
|
|
iCIMS January Labor Market Insights – Applicants up in 2023, What Will 2024 Hold
|
|
Employers seem to have ended the year in wait-and-see mode. When looking at December 2023 vs. December 2022, openings were at almost the exact same level, but hires are down 13%. Job seekers are still looking with confidence, with those same openings getting 14% more applications. After a chaotic few years, attrition levels have finally come back down to pre-Great Resignation levels. Despite a lot of ups, downs and shifts in every other data point, time to fill remained consistent throughout 2023 with a low of 38 days in April and a high of 45 in January.
Applicants per opening (APO) exploded in 2023, with the number of applicants applying for an open position jumping from 19 to 26. In manufacturing the number of applicant per opening jumped from 25 in 2022 to 39 in 2023
|
|
Manufacturing Matters Podcast
|
|
|
|
In this podcast episode, Mark shares insights into Allendale's role in manufacturing, their commitment to education, and the challenges schools face in finding qualified instructors for machining equipment. He highlights the importance of education in manufacturing, especially in schools where the need for skilled instructors is critical. The conversation delves into Allendale's efforts to support schools, including creating lesson plans, providing training, and even conducting demos to spark interest in manufacturing among students. The focus then shifts to the industry trends, with Mark emphasizing the increasing demand for automation, and the difficulty in finding skilled workers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
