Just five years ago manufacturing was considered a declining industry in Louisiana, with plant closures, job losses and attention focused on attracting other industries, such as digital media and renewable energy, and the workforce those industries need.
But as the cover story of the spring issue of the 10/12 Industry Report notes, by 2013, the low price of natural gas coupled with efforts to improve the state’s business climate had prompted a U-turn in Louisiana’s manufacturing industry. Each day seemingly brought yet another announcement of plans for a new plant construction or expansion of existing facilities.
By summer of 2014, the estimated dollar value of these new plants and announced expansions had reached $80 billion. Attention frantically focused on finding the projected additional 86,300 skilled craft workers needed by 2016 to turn these plans from abstract announcements to the reality of constructed plants, providing jobs and contributing to the state’s economy.
With the calendar now running well into 2015, 10/12 Industry Report wanted to know how efforts to train and supply the needed skilled industrial craft workforce are faring.
“Moving right along,” says Roland Toups, chairman/CEO of Turner Industries, an industrial contractor that employs some 9,000 workers in the Capital Region and was tabbed in February as a key contractor on Sasol’s $8.1 billion ethane cracker project in Lake Charles. “However, the demand curve is flatter because market conditions are rapidly changing. We are in a very dynamic environment with the oversupply and falling prices of oil, currency exchange issues and recent USW refinery strikes.”
A shortage exists in all skilled craft professions, though the shortage is particularly acute for welders, pipefitters, operators and electricians—“craft professions that require a lot of training and experience,” Toups notes.
To address the skilled craft workforce needs, government, education providers, professional organizations and nonprofits, and industry came together in what many describe as an unprecedented effort of cooperation and resource-pooling.
Yet, despite the collaboration, overcoming the immense shortage of craft workers within the estimated time frame will be difficult. Indeed, Curt Eysink, executive director of the Louisiana Workforce Commission, says it’s “a challenge on an order of magnitude that Louisiana hasn’t ever faced because the ramp-up is so quick. It’s ramping up faster than you can prepare people.”
Read the full feature, and also check out a list of workforce solutions, safety training options and union building/construction trades training programs.
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