BOISE, I.D. (WSYR-TV) — At least 100 Micron employees based at its Boise, Idaho corporate headquarters started with no technical experience.
That same group graduated in different classes from the College of Western Idaho.
“They send us students that don’t have any technical backgrounds and we train them so they can advance in the company,” said Department Chair and Professor, Robert Novak. “That is how we predominantly provide workers at Micron.”
The relatively new community college only 13 years old, CWI for short, doesn’t have a traditional campus. This program operates out of a renovated Sam’s Club store in a strip mall, now named the Micron Education Center.
Inside are no big box deals, but there are plenty of boxes. A mini conveyor system teaches students some fundamentals of manufacturing and logistics.
Novak explained: “In this program, we teach electronics, pneumatics, instrumentation and automatics. Although you may not know what those things are, they’re all in that machine.”
The lessons match what the students will find at Micron or the nearby Amazon distribution center.
Sound familiar? Onondaga County’s northern suburbs have an Amazon facility. Soon, it’s expecting a Micron megafab too.
That’s the inspiration behind Micron’s budding relationship with Onondaga Community College, which could involve funding of programs and pipelines to careers.
OCC is constructing a cleanroom on its campus, funded by Onondaga County and New York State.
CWI’s president, Gordon Jones, said, “I think community colleges, OCC and CWI, we’re by definition meant to be… there’s a reason ‘community’ is in our name, it’s because we’re very adaptive. I think its intuitions like that that can partner with four-year (colleges), partner with employers to think differently about how we can get those large numbers of individuals who want those jobs be aware of them, trained for it and on the job working.”
This report is one in a series from NewsChannel 9’s exclusive trip to Micron Corporate Headquarters in Boise, Idaho.
