Students and Department of Transportation staff are taking advantage of programs at SUNY Cobleskill to expand their technical knowledge. The partnership between the school and state is meant to close gaps in employment.
With a shortage of professionals entering careers in the trades, the Department of Transportation realized it needed to commit resources to attract young people. Now, students are getting technical, on-the-job training while receiving a paycheck.
Kaden Marvin is an assistant professor in the Agricultural Engineering Department and Cobleskill alum. Marvin says students aren’t coming in with the same skills as 10 or 15 years ago and with access to technologically advanced workshops, they can catch up.
“Everyone used to go and rebuild their dirt bike and it was kind of simple as oh two stroke engines,” Marvin said. “And now we've got these four strokes that are pretty complicated and 15-year-old is not going to tear his bike apart and risk blowing a $3,000 motor where it used to be you could get a top end kit for $100 and throw it together and you'd be okay with it. Now, yeah, you're going to spend a lot more than that. So, they're getting exposed to less to just using their hands and doing that stuff. And that's one of the downfalls. But through this program we come in, we have introductory courses that tries to build the hand skills. And then throughout the entire program, they're always using their hands growing those skills.”
While equipment is often loaned and donated with existing problems, Marvin says he sometimes creates challenges for students.
“All this different equipment, and this really expensive equipment and a lot of our industry partners whether it's John Deere, or Milton Caterpillar, Anderson Equipment, they bring us this equipment and let us use it. And then through our partnership with the Department of Transportation, they drop off equipment that they're kind of done with. It has reached its useful life cycle for the Department of Transportation and now it's our turn to play with it. And it's kind of nice using this almost as opposed to some of the new equipment because this has problems, it's already broken, I don't really have to reinvent the wheel and try to break something and make it look like I didn't break something. With this we can go through and diagnose real world things.”
Other areas of study include welding and working with airbrakes and traction control. Aside from learning the technical skills needed to complete the job, Marvin says students learn to ask the simple questions, too.
“There’s something to be said about going in tearing it apart and figuring it out. But there's also something to be said about kind of humbling yourself and saying, ‘I'm not quite sure I don't want to mess this up.’ So, we try to try to get them both sides of it.”
Junior Corey Cherivard says the course and program taught him the fundamentals of the work.
“It basically depends on where you're interning,” Cherivard said. “With DOT, for example, it was similar to a lab practice but the professor wasn't hovering around making sure everything was going according to plan. It was up to me to make sure everything went according to plan. Of course, there were supervisors making sure I wasn't going to damage anything. But generally speaking, it's up to the intern to make sure that they're acting accordingly. It's basically like a job.”
Marvin says DOT employees also take advantage of trainings at the college.
“Seeing the technicians that come in, and hearing all their thoughts about the training about what they deal with on a day-to-day basis,” Marvin said, “It's a lot of fun to see both sides of the book.”
Marvin says Shane Gilchrest, the Director for the DOT’s Office of Fleet Administration and Support, is to thank for the success of the program.
For his part, Gilchrest adds the Department is constantly improving with the help of partnerships.
“The education here prepares them to get ready to go in the industry,” Gilchrest said. “And then the learning multiplies from there, because we have training from manufacturers. The industry technology changes constantly. So, we have to learn and adapt to that every single year, which is why we are sending our folks here. But we also send our folks to other training as well so they can stay current. One of the challenges in the industry is we've spent a lot of money on engineering, highly technical, environmentally friendly piece of equipment, but we haven't made a large investment in the workforce to maintain that.”
Gilchrest says more than a decade ago, the Department saw a shortage of drivers and technical workers coming and knew it needed to be actively addressed. Gilchrest says over the years the Department has been able to conduct outreach and implement programs at local BOCES and CTE programs for high schoolers with an eye toward feeding efforts like this one.
However, Gilchrest says there are more ways than one way to work together.
“DOT has many different career opportunities, engineering, for example, designing roads and bridges and working with contractors to get capital projects done,” Gilchrest said. “There's administrative titles that are out there CDL drivers, there's a national shortage of CDL drivers on our maintenance side to that drive plow trucks. So, it's on the trade side. There's we're suffering like everybody else is but we have other career opportunities.”
Cherivard completed his internship program at the Waterford Fleet Facility. He says his course load is similar to those in STEM.
“The lecture and the lab really go hand in hand with each other. The way I set up is the lecture kind of, you know, talk about what you're going to do in lab, essentially, it's like a briefing, you know, which I find really helpful. Because when I get in lab, like, have my lab sheet, I'm like, ‘Oh, I know exactly what I'm going to be doing today.’”
Cherivard says he’s learned about the proper way to use tools, read manuals, and document work. He explains what a lab section looks like.
“With the diagnostic labs, it'll be sort of like a little dialogue about the machine like, ‘A customer brought this in and it's not working and how do you fix it?’ You know, these are the symptoms. Is there a way you can, you know, rectify this issue, or sometimes we'll be just learning about a system so we'll say identify these parts, you know, trace the schematic, identify this component on a schematic sheet because schematics are crazy interesting.”
DOT says while other colleges are experiencing low enrollment and financial difficulties, SUNY Cobleskill and DOT are expanding their offerings in OSHA Safety Training and Electrical Vehicle Training.
