Curt Doherty, CEO of CNC Machines, has about a dozen full-time employees to receive, prepare and resell the machining equipment cutting, shaping, and forming America's way back to manufacturing prominence. He started out in the early 2000s snapping up auctioned units from liquidating machine shops when so many manufacturing jobs moved to China. Now orders are coming back and that has kept the company he started in 2014 very busy. Moving inventory isn’t the problem anymore; finding suitable workers is. The Florida-based reseller has 60,000 manufacturers in its database and Doherty says none are immune from the skills gap created when all those trade jobs went away and the talent pool was not

The SVA has long supported worker buyouts in our three decades of saving jobs and business turnaround work. We’re seeing a new wave of worker ownership in American companies, a good thing. Organized worker ownership presents solutions to several problems that companies commonly face - including wealth inequality, lack of diversity, and lagging performance. True worker-owned firms, including employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and co-ops, are owned by the same people who work in, run and own the business. The shared ownership model promotes economic stability and allows all types of workers to build wealth through the company’s success. There are also millions of workers who belong to ESOP

It has become a tradition across high schools to hold a “signing day” for high school athletes to announce which team they will join. There is a signing day for kids to announce where they will go to college There is also the Skills US National Signing Day, where students sign “letters of intent” job offer, apprenticeship or advanced technical training. On May 8, local communities, school administrators, teachers, elected officials, SkillsUSA advisors, family and friends celebrated students for making the decision to pursue a career or continuing education in the skilled trades. Official spokespeople NFL quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo and his father, Tony Garoppolo, a career electrician, cele

The National Science Foundation recently awarded Pennsylvania College of Technology to address the manufacturing skills gap, which could total 2.4 million through 2028, according to estimates from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute. The $591,924 grant, awarded through the NSF Advanced Technological Education program, will fund several initiatives aimed at students, teachers, and school counselors during the next three years. “We are honored that the NSF has placed its faith in the college to help combat the alarming skills gap in manufacturing,” David R. Cotner, dean of Penn College’s School of Industrial, Computing & Engineering Technologies, said. “It’s estimated that five out of 10

For the past year, experts and stakeholders across the country have worked together to develop a new industrial policy that explicitly ties the goals of rebuilding America’s manufacturing base to that of revitalizing economically vulnerable communities and distressed regions. This endeavor has been called the High Wage America Project, whose interlinked priorities include spurring innovation, reshoring and revitalizing sustainable industries, reinvesting in workers, and mobilizing responsible capital. These objectives represent the best thinking of leading experts and practitioners from communities in the industrial heartland and will create the first-ever bottom-up, sustainable, and inclusi

Created by the Department of Community & Economic Development and made available through the Workforce and Economic Development Network of Pennsylvania – WEDnetPA – the program provides qualified employers training funds for new and existing employees. WEDnetPA is a unique, collaborative partnership of community colleges, state system universities and other educational institutions working together to be responsive to the needs of Pennsylvania’s business community. See www.WEDnetPA.com for the most current and complete list of WEDnetPA Partners.

U.S. Steel plans to announce on Thursday that it will spend $1 billion to upgrade its Mon Valley Works, a move the company says will keep the region’s last integrated steel mill operating for decades to come. The company will build a combined casting and rolling facility — the first of its kind at any American steel mill — and a cogeneration power plant. Put together, the combination aims to reduce emissions and increase the efficiency and sustainability of steelmaking in the Mon Valley. The facilities, expected to be running by 2022, will also make the Mon Valley Works the Pittsburgh company’s central source of base material for high-strength, lightweight, flexible steel that feeds the auto

A Bucks County middle school took home the top honors in this year's statewide “What's So Cool About Manufacturing” video contest. Neil A. Armstrong Middle School of Bristol took first place in the statewide competition for its video featuring Macron Dynamics of Croydon. Watch the video below: This the second year that the contest, which began in the Lehigh Valley, but has spread across the state, has had a statewide winner. The first Lehigh Valley contest, concentrating on Lehigh, Northampton and Carbon counties, was six years ago. Organizers, including Dream it Do it PA and the Manufacturers Resource Center now hold 15 annual regional contests in which middle-school students across Pennsyl