Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - The Northland Workforce Training Center (NWTC), a training facility for advanced manufacturing in Buffalo, is partnering with M&T Bank, announcing the continuation of their successful operation, Northland Manufacturing, a contract manufacturing social enterprise.
Northland Manufacturing, a machine shop within the NWTC, has been providing business to business contract manufacturing services while providing students with real work experience aligning with their training at NWTC.
"We're really proud M&T Bank was able to provide $125,000 grant to launch Northland Manufacturing and pleased to support its continued growth in this event and onward," said Eric Feldstein, Western New York Regional President for M&T Bank.
"As a nonprofit, one of the biggest challenges we face is financial sustainability and one of the strategies that we wanted to deploy was diversifying our revenue streams. That gave us the idea to launch Northland Manufacturing. In addition to providing those manufacturing services to the sector, we are now creating jobs on the East Side of Buffalo, employing students currently enrolled in Northland programming," said Stephen Tucker, President and CEO of NWTS.
"Today's announcement will be another day of great progress for the City of Buffalo. It will open even wider the doors of opportunity for many people in our community to be here to be trained in advanced manufacturing and green technology and more, because Northland is also expanding its offerings, which is great. It will make the progress that we're seeing in this city even richer and even deeper," said Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown.
The training center has hired several students so far and hopes to employ at least 20. Since the inception of the training center in 2019 and Northland Manufacturing in 2020, the NWTS continues their efforts to fill jobs in the manufacturing and clean energy sectors. The center expects their to be a need to fill about 20,000 job openings in both spaces over the next five to ten years according to the CEO.
"Both sectors have an aging workforce and a non-existent pipeline. People are either not aware of, interested in or have the technical skills necessary to fill these advanced manufacturing roles," said Tucker.
Northland Manufacturing are asking companies if you have any odd jobs that need completion, consider talking to the Northland Manufacturing team for a quote.
"We really would appreciate anybody that has odd jobs, slow jobs or maybe some of the rough jobs that you don't want your qualified machinists spending the time on, we would love the opportunity to quote those jobs," said Jon Sieminski, Director of Manufacturing Operations at NWTC.
"We're able to quote jobs at about half the rate of most local machine shops. At the same time, the students that we're hiring are making $15 an hour across the hall, not across town so the logistics aren't involved," Sieminski says.
Oswald Love, a student of NTWS said that his experience at Northland is something that he would recommend to anybody, "It's knowledge and information that you can't even put a value on right now. And to me, I feel blesses and honored to be a part of Northland. I would recommend it (Northland) to everybody."
To listen to the full announcement, see the player below: