Shaping the future of manufacturing

So this week we're really celebrating the start of Virginia Tech Made, which is our new center for advanced manufacturing. We have received a grant, and part of that grant is not only to sort of rethink the way that we do manufacturing education at Virginia Tech, but to make sure that we're doing what is needed by industry. An advanced manufacturing workforce benefits everyday people by driving economic stability and growth. This kind of preparation also reduces unemployment, empowers communities, and ensures that the progress of manufacturing reaches all segments of society. We lack the training capacity in the country. We moved away from manufacturing training into more service industry-oriented training. And as we've sought to recapture that training, it also needs to be modernized. We're going to have workers who are more productive, who are more satisfied in their job, who've built skill sets over their lives, right? So an advanced manufacturing workforce equals our workforce going forward. I think Virginia Tech Made will provide opportunities for Virginia Tech students to gain hands-on experiences, as well as connections with industry partners, both within and outside of the university. city, and hopefully through those experiences they will learn skills that will help them contribute to the future manufacturing workforce. In today's workshop, our participants are not only engaging in brainstorming activities to help us listen to them about what they need, but they're also interacting with our faculty and our students to learn more about the research that we do here at Virginia Tech, but also to learn more about the educational activities that we already have ongoing. So really the two key takeaways that we hope that our partners will leave with are first and foremost our commitment to work together to define the future engineering workforce and second for them to see all of the exciting facilities that we have and overall our university's commitment to advancing the state-of-the-art of manufacturing.