Team NEO created an online portal for middle and high school students showing in-demand manufacturing jobs, required certifications, education pathways, and median salaries. The effort grew from research showing mismatches between job demand and graduate credentials, with separate reports examining racial and gender equity gaps in the field.
Is there anything that you guys are involved in to help the folks coming out of high school and maybe trade schools or in college be ready to move into a manufacturing environment?
Yeah, so that's a great question. So that's something that Team NEO has gotten involved in over the past couple of years. So we have a report called the Aligning Opportunities Report. And what that looks at is the mismatch between the jobs that are needed and what people are graduating with, what credentials they have. And so we're seeing these massive gaps in manufacturing. So that led us to creating a few other reports. We have a Misaligned Opportunities Report. It's all about racial equity and looking at the mismatch there in jobs. And then in 2020, we— or 2021, we did the Lost Opportunities Report, which is looking at the mismatch for women. But In addition to this work, as we started looking at this, we realized it's almost too late to engage students in college to get into these manufacturing careers. It's absolutely too late, right? I know when I went to college, I was going to be a pastry chef. Like, you couldn't have changed my mind. I never heard the word manufacturing in high school ever. You know, I heard engineering, but I didn't know what that meant or like what kind of job you could have or what the opportunities were. Were right where I already lived. So what we've done, we've partnered with a number of different local organizations to work on this and kind of get the message out there. But we have an emerging talent portal on Team NEO's website. And what that is, is we look at the in-demand careers and we've put together pages on each of those careers that talk about what, what do you need to get into that career? What certifications do you need? What kind of education? What is a median salary that you might make? And then we also have some little like 3, 4-minute video vignettes of younger people who are in jobs talking about how they got there, what excites them about it. And then all, all of these videos and this whole talent, emerging talent portal is geared towards 6th through 12th graders.
