Building Tomorrow’s Workforce

by Shelley Morris –

It was great to see many of you during our 50th anniversary celebration! If you haven’t been here in a while, you were likely surprised by the changes. Besides the growth in both plants, you got to see Maintainer University, our training and onboarding center. Several of you have followed up with questions about the program and how it works. This is true of many of our visitors as well, so I am glad it has created a spark, and we’re happy to share what we can to help you along the way. If there is one common challenge for all of us, it’s finding, training, and keeping good employees.

Maintainer University officially opened with the training center in January of 2025. It is barely 18 months old. However, in that time:

• We’ve delivered more than 8,000 hours of training, plus safety training.
• Hosted high school students from 6 area schools.
• Accepted 10 high school students for training starting this fall.
• Graduated and hired 3 high school students following the program.
• Onboarded 82 new team members.

We’ve trained employees the old-fashioned way forever — we threw them to the wolves. We’ve worked with our local community college too, but first they ended the auto body paint program, and the welding program all but dried up a few years ago. I even served as an advisor on a manufacturing sector board there, but after losing coordinators, funding issues, and more, it wasn’t working for us. Our needs were many and immediate.

We hired Milt McPike as our training manager in 2024, a full year before the center would be open for students. He developed the training plans, created training tools, and made recommendations for equipment and teaching aids. While we are a long way from
Des Moines, word of our training made it to the capital. Iowa Workforce Development visited us after reading about us in the Des Moines Register. Support for in-house training is growing, and just this month the State of Iowa rolled out a new training grant program to support in-house employee training like ours. This is a big move, because traditionally the state has funded community colleges as the industry partner for this kind of training — and this new program doesn’t require that involvement. I’d like to think we are proving that our approach is much more effective.

One last point: The training center is about more than developing job skills. We teach life skills. We teach English and Spanish. We embrace cultural differences. We are making a difference at work and at home.

If you would like more information about Maintainer U, give us a call or drop me a note