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AUTOMAKERS BEGIN TO CULTIVATE DESIGNING WOMEN
By Margarita Bauza, Detroit Free Press
August 14, 2006 DETROIT - Katie Slater, a soft-spoken, ponytail-sporting 17-year-old, is attracted to fast cars and powerful engines.
As a 14-second, 100-meter sprinter at Cabrini High School in Allen Park, Mich., Slater says she thinks cars should run and look as sleek and fast as her sprint.
Chelsea Ramirez, 17, of Plantation, Fla., is more about luxury and less about practicality, even though her own wheels, a 2005 Honda Civic, are famously functional.
Meet the car buyers and designers of the future. According to Ford Motor Co. research, "Women influence 85 percent of all car-buying decisions and buy 45 percent of all vehicles," Ford spokeswoman Marisa Bradley said.
Despite that, women are still the minority in the design workplace, something the industry is trying to change. Women make up 39 percent of all designers in all industrial trades, including furniture, autos, boats and offices.
"It's really just getting the word out that this type of work exists and that there are a lot of different opportunities," said Susan Lampinen, group chief designer at Ford North America.
Ford employs more than 700 designers in the United States, England, Germany, Australia, Asia's Pacific region and South America.
At 38, Lampinen has influenced the design of numerous brands and show cars, including Lincoln, Mercury, Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz.
Ford's strategy to attract more women to design includes a $10,000 donation it made to Detroit's College for Creative Studies, which used the money for scholarships for high school girls to encourage enrollment in auto desi! gn classes. Scholarships ranged from $1,600 -- the cost of a summer class -- to at least $400.
Ford also reaches out to girls through a high school program in the Pontiac, Mich., school district. For the past five years, Ford designers have been paired with students from seventh grade through high school to teach the basics of sketching and rendering in weekly sessions. The program attracts between 30 and 35 students, and 30 percent of those are girls.
General Motors Corp. has a similar program through the College for Creative Studies and Detroit Public Schools that links art students with designers to create designs that appeal to young drivers. But Ford's program is the only one known to target girls.
The scholarships drew many high school girls. Among them is Shelby Hatfield, 16. She wants to design a car whose interior you can change to match its urban environment, whether you drive in Japan, New York or California.
"I think of cars as intimate spaces, and I think of every car that I come in contact with as a possible extension of myself," Hatfield said.
Hatfield cut out magazine ads that caught her eye -- pictures of lithe, athletic women tumbling through the air, a landscape of iridescent light, a sleek, silver Chrysler Crossfire. She said she's tired of the sameness that afflicts the current choices of SUVs and family cars. In her view, cars should look bold, like a Volkswagen Beetle or a sleek Corvette.
Even though she was obsessed with the Crossfire, she's now all about a yellow Lotus that she has seen around town.
"A car needs to look fast even when it's parked," she said about her ideal vehicle.
Boys are very much a part of this course. Kya Schultz, 17, welcomed the added diversity.
"We need to have something for everybody," said Schultz, whose dream car is a Mercury Marauder. "We need muscle cars in America, luxury for the Europeans." And, he said, there must be something that appeals to women.
And what exactly is that? That is what the auto industry wants to find out by bringing more women up through the designer ranks.
"There is a reason why we buy certain vehicles," said Lampinen, whose dream cars include the Jaguar E-Type, the Ferrari Dino and a Volvo S60, her current ride. "I love the way it drives, its design."
"Women have different needs. Women carry purses. They might have to put a child seat in the back. Storage is important."
But as McGee saw it, his future lay in the old-world industry of metalworking. And to succeed, he would have to do something that would shock many parents: turn down the scholarships and study machine-tool technology at a two-year technical college.
McGee, 21, realized what many American workers are missing: Manufacturing, long known for plant closings and layoffs, is now clamoring for workers to fill high-paying, skilled jobs. While millions of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or automated out of existence during the past decade, many of the remaining jobs require higher skills and pay well - $50,000 to $80,000 a year for workers with the necessary math, computer and mechanical abilities.
Some manufacturers are so desperate for workers who can program, run or repair the computers and robots that now dominate the factory floor that they are offering recruitment bonuses, relocation packages and other incentives more common to white-collar jobs.
In Ohio, American Micro Products Inc., an electrical parts maker, is offering $1,000 bonuses to workers who recruit technicians, and it is covering moving costs for the new employees. In San Antonio, Toyota cannot find enough qualified applicants for skilled positions at its new plant, even after the state sponsored a training program. In Fontana, California Steel Industries Inc. found it so hard to fill five mechanical and technical positions, some paying $28 an hour, that managers started paying employees to train for the unfilled jobs.
About 90% of manufacturers say they are having trouble filling skilled jobs such as machinists and technicians, according to a survey released in December by the National Assn. of Manufacturers, the leading industry group representing 12,000 manufacturers.
Of those manufacturers, 83% said the shortage of skilled workers affected their ability to serve customers. The shortfall has caught the attention of President Bush, who last week visited a metal parts maker in Green Bay, Wis., and noted that the company was unable to fill its orders because it couldn't find enough workers.
One of the biggest barriers to hiring young workers like McGee is manufacturing's reputation as dirty, low-paid and monotonous work. But McGee said he likes mechanical work - he had worked at a bicycle shop during high school and in his father's garage workshop - and was bored by the thought of liberal arts classes without real-world applications.
Now, after graduating from a private, Minneapolis-area high school, he is working as a paid apprentice at a local metal parts manufacturing firm, which also helped pay for his two-year technical training program at a community college.
"I find more value in on-the-job experience along with technical education experience" than in a four-year degree, McGee said. "I see a lot of people coming out of school with just the book knowledge and finding it hard to find a job."
At first, McGee's decision was tough for his parents to accept. Although Mike McGee, 49, is an academic dean at the community college his son attends, he still had visions of manufacturing work that involved "a blue-collar, tattoo on the arm, drink beer after the shift - not the kind of career for my son."
What changed his mind was seeing his son hired by E.J. Ajax & Sons Inc., which makes metal brackets, latches and other parts, some of which go into household appliances and industrial machinery. In addition to tuition and a $14-an-hour apprenticeship, the company is providing McGee with health insurance, a 401(k) and, once his training is complete, a salary of $58,240 a year.
That's more than his college-educated brother earns at an advertising job that took him two years to find.
"There are good jobs, and good benefits attached to them," Mike McGee said of skilled manufacturing workers. "It isn't the monotonous stand-at-the-line work."
The average industrial technician earned $54,643 last year, according to California's Employment Development Department. By comparison, median earnings for all full-time U.S. workers last year were under $34,000. Yet surveys show American youth see manufacturing as a low-paying career track they would rather avoid.
In Contra Costa County - home to a Dow Chemical plant that pays skilled workers up to $100,000, including overtime and bonuses - community college students think skilled manufacturing jobs pay less than $55,000, according to a county development board survey this year. Some 75% said they had not considered applying for a manufacturing job.
In addition to their image problem, manufacturers are having trouble finding skilled workers because older workers with the proper training are retiring in large numbers. And many assembly workers who were laid off in recent years are unwilling to return to manufacturing or unable to upgrade their math skills, said Mary Rose Hennessy, executive director of the Coalition for Manufacturers at Northern Illinois University.
Some companies say they are willing to pay to retrain workers, but that the community college programs they once relied on have been eliminated. Many of the 1,202 member colleges of the American Assn. of Community Colleges closed programs in recent years due to flagging student demand, said Norma Kent, vice president of communications.
Now, businesses are clamoring for new, updated programs that require costly training equipment, she said. Manufacturing is vulnerable to economic downturns, and colleges are wary that they will invest in expensive programs only to see jobs dry up.
When Toyota announced plans to open a new plant with 2,000 jobs in San Antonio, it received 100,000 applications from people eager to work. But for the 200 technician positions that required higher skills, the automaker had trouble finding applicants, said Daniel Sieger, spokesman for Toyota's North American manufacturing headquarters.
The state of Texas paid teacher Frank Quijano to train as many as 50 people at a time at a local community college for the skilled Toyota jobs, but only 20 signed up. When Quijano asked people at a job fair why they did not apply for the jobs, which will pay between $40,000 and $50,000, "they would all say it's low-paying, dangerous and dirty," he said.
Eventually, Toyota hired about 120 skilled workers, mostly by recruiting them from other manufacturers, Quijano said. That helped Toyota, Quijano said, but it also shifted the problem of finding skilled workers onto the companies whose employees had been lured away.
Sieger said Toyota expected to hire "a small percentage" of workers from other states so it could start production at the plant in November.
Quijano said that his classes are now full, as word has spread about the good pay for skilled jobs at Toyota. He said the company still needs 20 to 30 skilled workers, and may need more as business grows.
Shortages are forcing many manufacturers to recruit across state lines. Dow Chemical Co. is recruiting in Texas, Louisiana and Michigan to fill technician jobs for its plant in Pittsburg, Calif.
Such recruiting is riskier, since job candidates often balk at California's higher cost of living, suffer bouts of homesickness and later leave, said Alan Ichikawa, who is involved with recruiting at the plant.
Ichikawa is trying to fill 10 skilled jobs and expects to hire 80 to 90 more workers, mostly high-skilled, in the next five years. He hopes to hire some of the 25 students enrolled in a new, five-month, state-funded manufacturing program at nearby Los Medanos College.
During the past five years, Daniel McGee's employer, E.J. Ajax & Sons, has paid for training for all 50 of its workers, owner Erick Ajax said. But Ajax expects half the workforce to retire in the next 15 years and is having trouble finding replacements.
That is why Ajax wants to hold on to McGee. Ajax recently offered the young apprentice an additional incentive: If McGee enrolls in the manufacturing technology program to earn a bachelor's degree at the University of Minnesota, Ajax will pay his tuition.
This time, McGee says, he plans to accept the scholarship and earn the four-year degree he initially spurned.
"I plan on doing basically what my parents have done - have a house, cars, the American dream, I suppose," he said the other day while taking a break from working on the plant computers.
"I think it's actually going to happen quicker the way I'm doing it than most of the people my age, because I have on-the-job experience. Most people my age have another year of school, and then they're starting at the bottom."
Dorn outlined the organizational support system in place for some 1,700 schools across the United States who teach PLTW courses in a presentation to university, college and high school faculties held at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Currently Minnesota has 103 schools delivering PLTW curriculum including schools throughout the Twin Cities and in Mankato, Faribault, Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop and Nicollet school districts.
The number of schools offering PLTW courses continues to grow as the need for more skilled workers in manufacturing and engineering continues to increase. "Six years ago our national goal was to involve 1,500 schools in Project Lead the Way," explains Dorn. "Today we have over 1,700 schools offering our curriculum with indication that interest continues to grow."
"PLTW is a rigorous and reality-based pre-engineering program for middle and high school students. From national experience in other states, we know that even one or two PLTW courses help prepare students for the rigors of university and technical college engineering courses," says Jim Mecklenburg, Project Lead the Way Program Director. "The hands-on project/problem-based approach to instruction adds relevance and reinforcement to science and math."
PLTW High School curriculum aligns to national math and science standards for technology literacy, as well as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology which accredits college and university programs in applied science, computing, engineering and technology.
Conference discussion centered on earned PLTW credits that would transfer to university and college levels. According the national office of Project Lead the Way "research shows - and continues to confirm - that students introduced to engineering principles, concepts, and real-world problems in high school are better prepared for college engineering programs - and more likely to be successful."
Over the coming months K-16 faculties will work with the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System staff to develop credit transfer agreements for Minnesota's PLTW students.
Minnesota's Project Lead the Way is sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Engineering & Manufacturing Excellence. The Center is made up of lead university Minnesota State University, Mankato, and Alexandria, Anoka, and Hennepin Technical Colleges, Normandale Community College, South Central College and the Northeast Higher Education District, all members of the Minnesota State Colleges & Universities System.
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