Austin Community College helps develop the local workforce

Austin Community College helps develop the local workforce

Written by Eric Pulsifer Friday, 06 June 2008

Armed with two mobile phones and a laptop, Austin Community College graduate Henry King Jr., the 27-year-old owner of Hulk Automotive in Round Rock, is a prime example of the role technology plays in the modern workforce.

 

As an on-site automotive technician, King and his employees work from their trucks — mobile garages that go where the customers are. With portable diagnostic tools and a truck bed packed with parts, King gets wireless internet on the road and uses a widget on his computer to monitor traffic to make sure he is always on time.

“The way that technology has advanced has made work like this possible,” he said.

After graduating with an associate’s degree in automotive technology in 2003, King returned to ACC as an adjunct professor and will join the staff full-time this fall. Good workers are hard to find, King said, but students with training from ACC are good candidates. King has even hired some of his former students at Hulk Automotive.

Auto mechanics in the 21st century must do more than turn a wrench: they need the technical know-how to communicate with a car’s on-board computer systems and comprehend complex electrical systems. Automotive technicians who skip training and jump straight into the job market are in for a rude awakening, King said.

“They’re not going to have a chance. If they go straight into the workforce there’s no way they’re going to make it.”

Growing a community

Charlie Ayres, senior vice president of business retention and expansion at the Round Rock Chamber of Commerce said the need for skilled workers like King must be met to push the area forward.

“The most critical thing to the growth of a community, as far as the economy goes, is the workforce and the talent level and knowledge level of the workers that are in that community,” Ayres said. “The fact that ACC is here is going to sharpen our workforce in Williamson County. The needs are not currently being met. In most of the trade industries, there are jobs available, and most of those employers have trouble finding people to fill those positions.”

While companies once picked a location first and then recruited people to that area, Ayres said businesses are now less concerned with geography and more interested in the number of skilled workers in a region. The desired result for Round Rock is a cycle in which workers bring in more new businesses and new businesses bring in more workers.

Jobs of the future

As the workforce becomes more service-oriented, the demand for skilled workers and their value increases. The result is, today, many technical jobs offer higher pay than jobs that require a four-year degree. Ayres lists the automotive industry as proof. Because of the advanced technology now used in cars, a trained automotive worker can now make more than $60,000 a year.

“Too often in the past, we made the assumption that a student that is not on the pathway to college and a master’s degree really may be taking a backseat,” Ayres said. “Actually those trade industries that will have a student go through a certification, many times offer very lucrative jobs.”

Highly employable areas

Raymond Hartfield, co-chair of ACCtion 4 Education, fought on the frontlines of the battle to bring ACC to Round Rock because he said a community college in Round Rock is a sound investment for the future.

“A community that is growing like Round Rock and Williamson County will greatly benefit from being able to provide more jobs for our citizens who will actually go and take advantage of these higher education opportunities.”

Hartfield, who served on the Round Rock ISD school board for 14 years, is a community college graduate and said his past gives him first-hand experience of the opportunities that ACC will present for area graduates.

“Because of that, my children are all college graduates,” he said. “Education in my mind is the great equalizer. If there is anything that will lift families, individuals and the generations that follow, I honestly believe it is education.”

Hartfield said ACC will allow Round Rock to use some of its own resources to fill technical, high-paying jobs.

“What ACC uniquely does and what community colleges uniquely do is that they offer up curriculum for higher education study that allows a student to pick a destination toward an industry certification in a number of what I call highly employable areas,” he said. “In this era of workforce readiness, the community college is a vital part of the overall strategy.”

Workforce needs

Mike Midgley, ACC vice president of workforce education and business development, said that the school has always worked with the community to discover and fill the needs of a city’s workforce.

Nursing and healthcare technology will continue to be popular programs leading to in-demand, high-paying jobs, but ACC is aiming to provide the needed workers for developing career fields in Central Texas, including film and game development, commercial music management and the hospitality industry.

Midgley said the need for these skilled workers will only continue to expand with advancing technology and that the bulk of jobs available now, both nationally and regionally, require some college.

“It’s a different world than it was a couple of decades ago, and so even traditional jobs that at one point you could learn on the job – it’s very difficult to do that now. You need some level of training,” he said. “The item that you’re working with is much more complex, the way it operates is more complex, and so your interaction with it and the knowledge base you have to have to interact with it is more complex.”

Hulk Automotive Service, 775-4619

King started Hulk Automotive Service in 2000. He went on to take business classes at Austin Community and graduated in 2003 with an associate’s degree in automotive technology.

“It wasn’t even about the possibilities after I was done – it was about the possibilities as I was going through it,” he said. “As soon as I started taking classes I was able to start repairing problems that I never would have been able to work on before.”

King now teaches as an adjunct professor at ACC and will start as a full-time professor in the fall.