Some area technical colleges that host CNC boot camps have seen increased demand from both employers and students, so they have added additional courses.
CNC boot camps are accelerated courses that help students earn CNC operator skills sooner than the traditional coursework.
Waukesha County Technical College and the Waukesha-Ozaukee-Washington Workforce Development Board have teamed up to offer some of the boot camps at the college. In order to enroll in a boot camp at WCTC, students’ math and reading levels need to be at a 9.2 grade level.
“This is basically condensed and it is a very intensive six to eight hours a day,” said Francisco Sanchez, CEO of the WOW Workforce Development Board. “There is no general education courses required.”
WOW and WCTC have increased the number of boot camps they offer to meet the demand in the manufacturing industry, Sanchez said.
“We try to minimize the amount of time they spend in the technical college,” he said. “The manufacturers want to get people in, because there is a huge need right now.”
WOW also hosts a CNC boot camp at Moraine Park Technical College in West Bend, which currently has 16 students enrolled.
Often, WOW is able to bring employers in during the boot camp to talk to students about employment opportunities once they finish the courses.
“We started offering it because an employer came to us and needed about 15 CNC operators,” said Mike Shiels, dean of the School of Applied Technologies at WCTC.
In addition to WOW, WCTC works with the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership to match employers with students, he said.
WCTC previously offered three boot camps per year, but has doubled the offering this year. Last year, between 30 and 45 people graduated from the CNC boot camp, while close to 90 have completed the program this year.
“We have also increased the amount of sections that we’re offering in our one-year program as well,” Shiels said.
The one-year program provides training for CNC machinists, while the boot camp teaches basic manufacturing skills like blueprint reading and the basic operation of CNC machines.
The college has hired an additional full-time instructor to help teach some of the courses, he said.
At Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, there is a one-year course and a boot camp to learn CNC skills. The boot camp participants are generally dislocated workers who are upgrading their skills, said Debbie Davidson, vice president in the workforce and economic development division at Gateway.
“We have found that within the last year, companies are looking to hire again and are looking for maybe different skill sets that what people who worked in machining before had,” Davidson said.
Gateway aims to simulate a work environment at the boot camps, which are 15-week courses with 20 students each. The college recently upped its boot camp offering to three times per year.
Both CNC skills and soft skills like attendance are emphasized, Davidson said.
“Employers have said to us, you need to teach them (soft skills),” she said. “We’ve had great success. We’ve had over a 90 percent placement rate on individuals who come out of the program.”
