Duke Power Grant Will Help VGCC Train Solectron Creedmoor Employees
Vance-Granville Community College has received a $108,376 grant from Duke Power to train employees of Solectron Creedmoor.
The grant funds were provided through the Duke Power Community College Grant Program, which provides up to $3 million annually for four years to community colleges that serve Duke Power’s North Carolina service area.
The focus of the program is to encourage community and technical colleges to provide additional training for manufacturing and related industries. It is one of the many economic development initiatives the company announced in 2004, Duke Power’s 100th anniversary.
Solectron is an electro-mechanical systems manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, located on Telecom Drive in Creedmoor, and it is one of the largest employers in Granville County, with about 450 employees. Vance-Granville Community College has a long history of providing specialized training for the company.
The recent downturn in the telecom industry, and the economy in general, has had a significant negative impact on the facility, including loss of business and numerous reductions in its workforce, according to the grant proposal written by Garland Elliott, VGCC’s director of Economic Development Services.
In 2003, Solectron began implementing actions to address those issues with a major emphasis on Lean Manufacturing and 6 Sigma Quality principles. Results of these initiatives have been additional business and stabilization of the company’s workforce. The training funded by the Duke Power grant is intended to expand these efforts through further training of key functions within the organization, improvement of skills in critical areas and needs assessment of current capabilities to enable future development planning, Elliott said.
Vance-Granville training programs will assist Solectron employees obtain APICS certification, Green Belt certification, PMP certification, and MyData maintenance training. It will also provide for Workkeys job profiles and Workkeys assessments. These should help the company retain its workforce and position Solectron Creedmoor for continued success with new business opportunities and growth in the future.
Solectron is currently working on a schedule for the grant-funded training, and Elliott says he expects it to begin in May.
Vance-Granville Community College’s Economic Development Services provides training that is tailored to the individual needs of businesses and industries in the college’s four-county service area.
Duke Power, a business unit of Duke Electric, is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities and provides safe, reliable, competitively priced electricity and products and services to more than 2 million customers in North Carolina and South Carolina. The company operates three nuclear generating stations, eight coal-fired stations, 31 hydroelectric stations and numerous combustion turbine units. Total system generating capability is approximately 19,900 megawatts. More information about Duke Power is available on the Internet at
http://www.dukepower.com.
