United Solar Ovonics Partners with Montcalm Community College

When United Solar Ovonics (UNI-SOLAR) was looking to open a new facility to expand its production capacity of thin film solar products, an available skilled workforce was a critical consideration in its site selection process. When the company, headquartered in Auburn Hills, Mich., centered its search on Greenville, Mich., Montcalm Community College (MCC) stepped up to ensure UNI-SOLAR would have the resources to meet its training needs.

Between 2004 and 2006, the Greenville region lost more than 4,000 manufacturing jobs. With unemployment at 15.3 percent in July 2006, the region had a surfeit of workers with experience in manufacturing, but who would need training to transfer their skills to production of UNI-SOLAR’s thin film solar products.

Within days of their initial meeting in January 2006, the college began revising a curriculum that UNI-SOLAR had received from a college in South Carolina. That curriculum had originally been developed for the Intel Corporation, but MCC recognized the opportunity to build a similar program that would respond to the specific needs of UNI-SOLAR. To do so, the college coordinated WorkKeys testing and job profiling of technicians at the company’s Auburn Hills facility.

The WorkKeys Assessment System is a comprehensive tool for measuring, communicating and improving the common skills required for success in the workplace. It allows these skills to be quantitatively assessed in both individuals and in actual jobs. The in-depth job profile of the Auburn Hills workers created a detailed task list and allowed the college to ensure that the curriculum would cover all the critical skills that UNI-SOLAR sought in its new Greenville workers. This meant developing an emphasis on industrial technology (particularly vacuum forming, pneumatics and hydrolics), troubleshooting, problem solving, and communications.

In May 2006, the college curriculum committee approved a certificate in Integrated Manufacturing Technology, and the first class of 45 students began training in June. By combining the certificate classes with general education courses, students could also qualify for an associate degree.
At the time of the program launch, UNI-SOLAR required its new hires to have completed the popular program. However, business development at the Greenville plant soon outpaced the capacity of the program, and the company began hiring students before they had even finished. Eventually, UNI-SOLAR changed its hiring practice to no longer require program completion, and student demand has dropped off. However, the time and effort spent in developing the program was not wasted. Adapting again to the region’s workforce needs, Montcalm now offers much of the program’s technical curriculum by conducting on-the-job training of UNI-SOLAR employees.

Now that UNI-SOLAR has settled into Greenville, it is encouraging its employees to seek the well-rounded education, including problem-solving and critical thinking skills, that comes with an associate degree. This will improve the quality of their work and allow them to more easily advance within the company. To accomplish this, Montcalm Community College is retooling the delivery of the program in order to meet the needs of the company’s employees, who work 12-hour rotating shifts that are incompatible with traditional education schedules. Classes will be converted to modularized e-learning courses that will be delivered in an open lab format with an instructor available, allowing students more control of their schedules and the opportunity to learn at their own pace.