(Estherville)– Iowa Lakes Community College has been awarded a nearly $250,000 grant from the Coronavirus Relief Registered Apprenticeship Incentive Grant Program funded through the Federal CARES Act. Jolene Rogers, Executive Director of Community and Business Relations at Iowa Lakes tells KUOO news they’ll use the funds to create a new apprenticeship program at the Algona campus…
“And we’ll be able to set things up there for a new program called Industrial Maintenance. That’s the apprenticeship that we’ll be establishing. Gary Schmidt is the coordinator and he’s getting ready to visit with Richard Madden who is the U.S. Department of Labor representative to make sure we get the right standards from him and then the manufacturers will get together to go over the curriculum to do the review and then we’ll be up and running once that equipment is installed. We’ll also have some automation equipment over there in Algona like we have here in Estherville. A lot of the Spirit Lake businesses, manufacturers, have been sending their folks over to Chad Tischer to do programmable logic training and things like that with the robotics automation components. So we’ll establish the Industrial Maintenance Apprenticeship at Algona and then we’ll also be able to offer that same apprenticeship over to the businesses on the west side of the district.”
Rogers says skills classes will be offered in conjunction with the Apprenticeship programming and will include workplace communications, team building and problem-solving. She says those courses will be offered virtually, with 120 hours of hands-on training at the Algona campus. Rogers says they plan to have the new program up and running in January…
“We’re kind of the on the fast track here with all those classes that we’re doing with the other grant and now getting this apprenticeship up and going, but it’s really been fantastic and I think a bright spot for people in our region where we’re still, you know, battling the pandemic and the physical and emotional consequences of that.”
She adds the training will be offered in staggered sessions to accommodate social distancing…
“We’re planning to do like week long training. We think that will be better for the employers and employees. They come to the college for a week and then they go back to work, so we’ll be able to stagger those out more and keep the numbers low so that we’re not having too many people in the room at a time either, so they can come safely and do their work and then we can bring in another group so they can have staggered starts.”
Businesses and individuals wanting more information should contact Rogers at 712-362-0431.
