HOW CAN SYRACUSE TRAIN WORKERS IN THE AGE OF MICRON? LOOK TO THE WEST FOR ANSWERS

Story originally published June 2024 via Syracuse.com

A major part of Syracuse’s plan to train workers for the semiconductor industry is based largely on a model that’s been operating for years in Buffalo: the Northland Workforce Training Center.

Northland is an immense facility that trains hundreds of people each year and has been held up as the gold standard for finding, educating and placing talent in advanced manufacturing.

Graduates have become electricians, welders, machinists, mechanics and technicians, earning on average around $45,000 a year.

Gov. Kathy Hochul described Northland as “an incredible model” that she’s seeking to replicate with her One Network for Regional Advanced Manufacturing Partnerships (ON-RAMP) program, which will have a flagship location in Syracuse. The $200 million effort will support four facilities spread out between Buffalo and Albany that provide credentials and training related to advanced manufacturing.

The need is urgent.

Micron Technology’s proposal to invest $100 billion into four semiconductor fabrication plants in Central New York prompted a rush of preparation, with job training a priority.

CenterState CEO, the region’s economic development agency, has been charged with helping to plan Syracuse’s ON-RAMP and has been studying Northland.

“I’m a big fan of the model,” said Dominic Robinson, senior vice president of inclusive growth at CenterState CEO.

But here’s the rub: While Northland has been praised and studied, its output of graduates would barely make a dent in filling the thousands of jobs Micron could generate here.

That’s the harsh reality of workforce development. It’s a task that, even when executed well, is hard and costly.

It’s not just helping job seekers fill out resumes or learn how to interview. These programs seek to train people with a limited work history but with potential.

Those workers need wraparound services, such as transportation or child care help. They need constant career counseling, tuition reimbursements or stipends, months or even years of continuing education, and ways to instill a sense of self-worth or confidence. Recruiting is key.

“Workforce development is not a linear thing,” Robinson said.

“If you’re not thinking about how you recruit people, how you engage them, how you provide them with the right supports and services, how you remove barriers … then you don’t get results,” he said.

Here’s what this region can learn from Northland.

Rehabbing a region

Like Syracuse, the Buffalo region lagged other U.S. cities on employment and income for decades, fueled by a decline in manufacturing.

To combat that, Gov. Andrew Cuomo debuted in 2012 his “Buffalo Billion” initiative, pledging to invest $1 billion into the Buffalo-area economy to create new jobs and spur large-scale private investment. (A state audit years later found much of the Buffalo Billion project was plagued with insufficient oversight, a lack of due diligence and wasted taxpayer funding.)

The Northland Workforce Training Center would become the signature workforce component of the Cuomo plan, with about $60 million spent on rehabilitating multiple vacant buildings among dozens of acres of a historic manufacturing district on Buffalo’s East Side.

The site wasn’t random: The Northland beltline used to house major manufacturers with thousands of employees in the mid-20th century. They made everything from shock absorbers for military cannons to automotive parts.

After those companies shuttered or left town, the area declined rapidly, and today the ZIP code where Northland resides is one of the poorest in Western New York, with roughly 33% of its residents experiencing poverty.

The Northland center, finished in 2018, takes up roughly 90,000 square feet of a 235,000-square-foot facility.

It’s got workspaces upon workspaces, a mechatronics lab, electrical training rooms, modern classrooms, gathering spaces, offices and more.

Syracuse’s ON-RAMP will take a similar approach to its location.

Though the site is yet to be announced, Robinson said Syracuse’s facility will be located somewhere within the city limits to make it easier for disadvantaged communities to access. If they follow Northland’s model to land within the highest-poverty areas, likely places would be downtown or the West and South Sides.

Building community trust

Nobody wants to grow up and be in workforce development, said Stephen Tucker, Northland’s founding president and CEO, “because nobody knows what it is. There’s not a degree you can go get.”

Stephen Tucker, president and CEO of Northland Workforce Training Center, poses in front of a large mural depicting the city of Buffalo in the Northland lobby.
Brad Racino

Tucker, a U.S. Air Force veteran, started out participating in a program at Cincinnati’s Urban League, and found he enjoyed helping people. He’d spend the next 20 years in workforce development before landing at as Northland’s founding president and CEO in 2017.

It would become the biggest undertaking of his career.

“People don’t realize,” Tucker said. “They see our success now. But when I started, it was just myself, four board members and a business plan.

“We had to literally build everything from scratch,” he said.

One of Tucker’s first mistakes, he recalled, was assuming that Buffalo residents would embrace Northland.

He was wrong.

The African American community in particular felt sidelined during planning conversations and thought Northland wouldn’t be “for them,” he said.

According to Tucker, advocacy groups opposed Northland’s plan, taking issue with the entrance exam – used to make sure students had the rigor required for a college program – calling it discriminatory. (Northland offers for-credit, certificate and degree programs at SUNY Alfred State College and SUNY Erie Community College.)

Early on, just 25% of entrants scored higher than the 10th-grade literacy and numeracy levels required to get into the program.

“When you’re working at a company like Micron, if you’re a millimeter off, that’s life or death,” Tucker said.

But “entrance exams don’t determine grit,” he added. He went to work convincing businesses and industry that a 10th-grade level should be the standard when students leave the program, not upon entrance, and that Northland should enroll people who score lower as long as they were offered support.

Today, Northland accepts students who score at a 6th- or 7th-grade level, and an academic support team coaches them throughout their education.

Northland also used to test students for drugs before placing them into jobs, using the results to offer counseling. But advocates took issue with that, too, Tucker said. SUNY Erie and Alfred State didn’t drug test students at their main campuses, critics contended, so why did Northland?

The center stopped testing for drugs.

“Being intentional about engaging the community, listening to the community, and addressing their concerns, is something that you have to do in order to be successful,” Tucker said.

In Syracuse, CenterState has run employment and workforce training programs (including some on advanced manufacturing) for more than a decade.

It has tried to include Syracuse’s underrepresented communities by way of partnerships and “ambassadors” who have graduated from its programs, such as the Syracuse Surge Accelerator, which fosters entrepreneurship, and Surge Defense, which trains workers in defense manufacturing and places graduates at Lockheed Martin.

Since 2014, CenterState has seen more than 2,500 people complete its programs, with more than 1,800 gaining employment shortly after.

Wrap-around services

By his junior year at Amherst Central High School in Buffalo, Jahleel Williams knew he wanted to become an electrician.

Raised in a self-described lower-middle-class family, Williams learned the value of hard work and the importance of education after high school. But he said he wasn’t a fan of school work and didn’t have the money or support for college.

He’d started an electrical program at Erie1 BOCES during his junior year and loved it. During his senior year, he remembered that a Northland employee had visited his school to talk to students.

He arranged a tour at Northland, then applied.

“I decided I had nothing to lose with it,” Williams said.

Staff helped him secure scholarships to cover most of the tuition. Northland says it awarded 143 students with more than $283,000 in grants in a recent year.

They provided Williams with a loaner toolbox to use for coursework. Other students got shuttle service.

“They helped me quite a bit, because I wasn’t getting a lot of help from my parents at the time,” he said.

After two years, he ended up finding work with a local electrical contractor, Hildreth Electric, while still taking classes. He transitioned to full-time work after graduating.

He said he plans to stay at the company for a while to learn residential work, then possibly move toward a more industrial path at a company like National Grid.

Today, at 19 years old, Williams often finds himself being an ambassador.

“Northland is really great for those kids that don’t really know what they want to do,” he said. “Or maybe they know they want to make some money, or they want to get a degree, but they don’t want to be in debt.”

Northland’s original goal was to train more than 300 students like Williams each year. Last year it surpassed those numbers for the third year in a row with a total paid enrollment of 346 students.

Those who drop out, Tucker said, usually weren’t serious enough.

“We get some people who say, ‘I can go to school for free, let me try this out.’ And they go and then they figure out it’s very physical, it’s not fun and games, and they drop out,” he said.

The exterior of the Northland Workforce Training Center on Northland Ave. in Buffalo’s East Side.
Brad Racino

The problem, he said, is that students don’t have any skin in the game. They can go through the process, with Northland investing $10,000 to $12,000 into their education, and then decide it isn’t for them.

Even with dropouts, Northland claims a 62% graduation rate, nearly three times higher than the national average for local community colleges.

It retains students with a series of aid: free transportation, child care, an emergency fund, financial education, a lending library, math tutoring and career assistance long after graduation.

But students often also need emotional support – both at Northland and CenterState.

“Have you ever heard the saying, ‘It’s easier to raise a strong boy than to fix a broken man?’ ” said Cainaan Webb, a career navigator at CenterState.

“We get a lot of people who are super smart – sharp as a whip – but nobody ever believed in them their whole life,” Webb said.

A lot of workforce development involves battling that mentality, he explained, and “restoring people to their natural state” before getting into education.

Teachers must find ways to instill self-confidence and self-worth, often using small class sizes and peer-to-peer learning to build camaraderie and accountability, and maintaining constant contact with students during and after their education, Webb said.

But those challenges are all secondary to getting students in the door.

A lack of awareness

During a tour of Northland, Tucker pointed out the opportunities all around the facility: the Tesla plant in South Buffalo, the General Motors plant in Tonawanda, and the General Mills plant along the Buffalo River.

“People don’t know that these jobs exist,” he said. “They drive past them every day and have no idea that people are making $150,000 in their facility.”

“So No. 1, we got to raise awareness.”

To do that, Northland has a four-person team of outreach specialists who work full-time visiting schools, community centers and churches.

Northland also runs advertising campaigns on radio, works at events and festivals, and has enlisted Dion Dawkins, a Buffalo Bills lineman, as its celebrity spokesperson for commercials and billboards.

Northland employs about 40 staff members on a budget of around $5 million, mostly government funding.

To diversify its revenue, Tucker launched Northland Manufacturing, where students make components for local companies at a discounted rate. Those students are paid for their work, and any profit is reinvested back into the training center.

A giant tub of scrap metal sits next to machinery used by students during their training within the Northland Workforce Training Center.
Brad Racino

Northland and CenterState emphasized how they work with employers to train workers for established needs.

“A lot of our focus with CenterState is to make sure they understand what our workforce demands are now and into the future,” said Chandra Marshall, the Syracuse site general manager at Lockheed Martin. “And that we understand different programs and things that they’re doing to make sure that the local community can support the workforce that we have.”

Additionally, CenterState works with the Syracuse Financial Empowerment Center to provide financial counseling and budgeting support; community groups like the Westcott Community Center for food pantries, transportation assistance and housing help; and local organizations like CNY Works for job training subsidies.

Building partnerships

Northland owes a lot of its success to its partnerships, primarily with Alfred State and SUNY Erie.

Alfred State, which has highly ranked programs in such areas as welding and machining, offers an associate’s degree at Northland, while SUNY Erie offers a mechatronics program.

Staff from these colleges deliver the training, while Northland handles the outreach, recruiting, admissions, and financial aid processes for students.

Central New York‘s major academic institutions are already collaborating around Micron.

Onondaga Community College, Le Moyne University, Syracuse University, Monroe Community College and others as far as Rochester and Buffalo are involved in groups like the Future-Ready Workforce Innovation Consortium or the NY SMART-I Corridor – which are both co-led by CenterState.

They are already working together to find ways to accommodate Micron’s need for manufacturing and construction jobs, and building partnerships within their groups to align education and training.

“We’re big on partnerships, because we know we can’t do it alone,” said Onondaga Community College President Warren Hilton. “It’s not just self-serving. If we work together, we’ll solve some of the issues in the community.”

Get on the bus

In May, a Syracuse contingent organized by CenterState that included nearly 30 people representing local and regional nonprofits, philanthropists, academics and employers chartered a bus to Buffalo to learn about Northland.

“It was a chance for everyone to see a reference point for what could be possible here,” Robinson said.

The group was impressed by how Northland managed to attract a student population that is more than 50% people of color.

The facility’s location, educational partners, course offerings and support systems were tremendous, said Jasenko Mondom, an employment specialist at the Syracuse City School District’s Refugee Assistance Program, who took the tour.

A big part of Mondom’s work involves finding jobs for immigrants and refugees, and the kind of training Northland offers – which can range from 12-week classes to two years – is much more realistic and affordable for that population than a four-year degree, he said.

Since that trip, CenterState has had weekly calls with Tucker and his staff.

In the end, both Robinson and Tucker acknowledged, Micron is not going to get 9,000 employees out of Syracuse’s ON-RAMP facility.

ON-RAMP will be one component of a workforce development system in Central New York.

There are also the local colleges and universities that are gearing up. The Manufacturers Association of Central NY just recently received a $6 million federal grant to bolster its registered apprenticeship program to train for Micron jobs; and other cities along the newly designated NY SMART-I Corridor are receiving tens of millions toward workforce initiatives.

And when it comes to the amount of taxpayer money involved in these efforts, Robinson acknowledged the high price tag, but said that at the end of the day, “it costs what it costs.”

“To do this right, we have to make big, bold investments.”

“But I think that our approach on this is to say, ‘How do we think about leveraging existing assets, rather than either trying to stay on the state’s dime or having to go out constantly fundraise?’ ” he said.

Brad Racino is a business enterprise reporter for Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, where he covers innovation, workforce development and CNY’s future economy. Reach out with story ideas, tips or concerns to bracino@syracuse.com.