How do you effectively prepare high school students for the manufacturing jobs of today and tomorrow? If you’re Chardon High School career and technical education (CTE) instructors Tracey Britt and Kim Butala, you partner with Amatrol and Buckeye Educational Systems to create what Taneisha Cordell from ABC News 5 Cleveland calls “a technology playground.” According
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, employers in every sector experienced a phenomenon that manufacturers had been dealing with for many years: a shortage of skilled workers. Most people vividly remember “CLOSED” signs adorning windows due to staffing shortages. While we’re a ways past the pandemic now, many businesses continue to experience skilled labor
FAIRVIEW, TN – He took the job in 2003 as a business education teacher. But Kevin Sizemore didn’t know he’d build a mechatronics program that offers students an associate’s degree along with their high school diploma. Sizemore, the mechatronics instructor at Fairview High School in Fairview, TN, said his goal as an instructor is to
Today’s career and technical education (CTE) instructors face a variety of challenges. For many new CTE instructors, it’s a matter of establishing a program and getting it off the ground. However, it can be just as difficult to revive and improve an established program that’s underperforming. That’s the situation Dean Lepkowski found when he took
There’s more than corn in Iowa. Baseball fans who cherish the 1989 classic Field of Dreams will remember a baseball diamond forged out of a corn field outside Dyersville, Iowa, that brought the ghosts of former baseball greats out to play ball. Today, just down the road from Dyersville, you’ll find an institution that
If you’re a fan of country music classics, you’re probably familiar with Alan Jackson’s 1992 hit, Chattahoochee, an ode to the muddy river that taught him how to swim, who he was, “a lot about livin’ and a little ‘bout love.” Today, the Chattahoochee teaches a lot more than that. We’re talking about Chattahoochee Technical
As the global economy continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturers all over the world are still struggling to fill hundreds of thousands of open positions. Despite their best efforts, manufacturers face a shortage of highly-skilled workers to meet their increasing demand. The skilled labor shortage isn’t the only challenge facing manufacturers, though. Global
In today’s world, more and more technology is becoming “smart.” But how does this apply to the HVACR industry? What is Smart HVACR? Smart HVACR is the successor to the programmable thermostat era of heating, cooling, air conditioning, and refrigeration systems. A smart HVACR system uses sensors and interconnected devices to collect data from the
“The robots are coming! The robots are coming!” If there were a cry to herald the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it might indeed echo the famous warning often attributed to Paul Revere. Just replace the British with robots and you get the idea. As Industry 4.0 technologies take hold in the modern manufacturing
Amatrol is proud to announce the launch of its new Smart Manufacturing Learning System (990-SM10), developed in partnership with CESMII — The Smart Manufacturing Institute. CESMII’s mission is to “[r]adically accelerate the development and adoption of advanced sensors, controls, platforms, and models, to enable Smart Manufacturing (SM) to become the driving sustainable engine that delivers
When I was but a wee youngster, I vividly remember thinking about the future and wondering what marvels I would see in my lifetime. For some reason, I was certain that flying cars would be the norm by now. Of course, today’s automobiles are still firmly grounded, although many of them are now electric. Can
Major federal legislation coupled with recent industrial trends point to the potential for a resurgence of growth in the United States’ manufacturing sector. In particular, this growth centers on those embracing smart technology, or what has become known as Industry 4.0. The decade leading up to the COVID-19 crisis (2010-2019) saw 1.3 million manufacturing jobs
