A large bus decked out in Manufacturing Week decorations pulled up to Clark College’s Columbia Tech Center campus Monday morning. As the bus unloaded, people wearing blue Washington Business Association jackets crossed the parking lot, rushing for their chance to tour the school’s mechatronics lab.
The mechatronics lab presentation was part of the association’s Manufacturing Week bus tour, which began in Olympia on Thursday and will end in Yakima on Oct. 13.
“We all know how hard it is to find workers, so this is one of the places where we’re trying to help change that,” said Carl Douglas, director of Clark College’s Center of Excellence for Semiconductor and Electronics Manufacturing. .
Douglas went on to talk about the importance of Clark’s program and went through the different types of training students go through.
“As we guide students through the program, and they get the full two-year mechatronics program, they’re going to get paid more, get experience from internships and externships and programs like that,” Douglas said. “But in the end, they’re going to learn ideas, they’re going to learn functions, they’re going to learn products to bring everything together.”
The bus tour was on its third day as it rolled through Clark County, starting at the college and then visiting Analog Devices in Camas before heading east to the Columbia River Gorge.
It is the sixth year of the event, which also coincided with the nationwide MFG Day event.
The association estimates that 265,000 people work in manufacturing in Washington. And the state aims to double that number in the next 10 years.
“The No. 1 concern that manufacturers share with us is their concern about supply chain vibrancy — to have a healthy and strong supply chain, especially as they go through their production seasonality,” said Kris Johnson, president in the association.
Johnson said about 13 percent of manufacturers source materials domestically, according to the association’s most recent survey.
“We’ve seen some early signs of renewal happening,” he said, adding that recovery doesn’t happen overnight.
Washington is the nation’s 10th-highest producer of wafers, Johnson said. “And it’s all located right here in Clark County.”
But to maintain that semiconductor supply chain, Johnson noted two things: people and power.
“Clark County has really leaned into solving workforce issues,” Johnson said. Discovery High School, the mechatronics program at Clark College, internships and internships and so on were examples he gave.
Then, however, there is power. With a doubling of production would come a doubling of energy needs.
“That means we need a lot more energy to come this way. And it has to be carbon-free, it has to be reliable and it’s going to be affordable,” Johnson said.
Analog Devices is trying to stay ahead of the employment growth curve as it tries to double its local manufacturing.
But there is not enough local talent to fill the necessary positions.
“That’s why we’re working with these schools on things like the intern program that we do through the college, because we hate stealing from other companies that are local,” said John Michael, general manager at the Analog Devices facility in Camas. “It just removes talent if it’s already there, rather than refilling the pipeline.”
Michael pointed to the recently passed CHIPS and Science Act that passed Congress this summer, calling it critical to local workforce development.
