Southwest Florida Business Today publisher Karen Moore recently heard Collier County Community Foundation President-CEO Eileen Connolly Keesler share how the foundation is working to fill local labor gaps, particularly in aeronautics.
Collier County residents see a need to offer more technical and technology skills training and education opportunities to better meet the county’s future workforce skills requirements, according to a five-year old study done by the Collier County Community Foundation in collaboration with the M. Schultz Family Foundation.
Foundation President-CEO Eileen Connolly Keesler shared how they are addressing that in the arena of aeronautical skills.
“We have an amazing technical college with Lorenzo Walker, but they're limited because they're under the school district, right, on what they can do and how much money they can spend," she said. "So I went through their aviation program one day. As I walk through there, they said, ‘Yeah, you know, this is our program, and we have these engines that we're training people to be mechanics for aviation, except the FAA would never recognize these engines, they're so old.'"
"Those are the people that Southwest Florida has hired to work on airplanes, who are working on engines and they have no idea they're so old. That doesn't make me feel very good,” said Connolly Keesler.
Keesler and the foundation went into action with some help from some donors.
"So we bought them a helicopter. We bought them a King Air and we bought them two engines that actually FAA would recognize it as an engine," she said.
The impact was immediate.
"They had 25 kids that were in the program. Now they're going to be able to have 50 kids in the program. They have all new tools and this program is going to be amazing. There's 147 jobs right now in Southwest Florida for aviation mechanics, so we can pump them out. And those are good paying jobs. So we were really excited to be part of that and we feel like made air travel a little safer in Southwest Florida."
So, as in so many things, a little attention can really go a long way to ensure we’re properly training our workforce for the needs of today—and tomorrow.
Karen Moore is publisher of Southwest Florida Business Today and special to WGCU.
