Wilkes County high-tech materials training center develops industry cluster in northwest
Frustrated with their region's slow, steady loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs and finding new business development opportunities scarce at best, leaders in Alleghany, Ashe and Wilkes counties came together last year to bring an economic development strategy more common in urban areas like the Research Triangle Park to their rural northwest corner of the state. They believed the strategy, to build a high-tech industry cluster in the region around the advanced materials market, was their best hope for transitioning their local economies from reliance on dying traditional industries to specialized firms capable of weathering future structural changes and cyclical downturns.
With the initial planning work behind them, the Northwest North Carolina Advanced Materials Cluster Initiative is turning its attention to building a highly skilled local workforce to support the cluster. With funding from local, state and federal organizations, including a recent $50,000 grant from the Rural Center, the initiative will soon open the only advanced materials training center east of the Mississippi River, and one of just a few in the U.S. The center's grant, made through the N.C. Economic Infrastructure Fund's Economic Innovation program, will help establish a two-year advanced materials training and certification program at Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro.
Students who graduate from the program will receive a degree in the field of advanced materials, a fast-growing market in the industry whereby highly engineered materials, such as fiber-reinforced polymers, ceramics, semiconductors and nanoparticles, are blended together to make a stronger composite material to replace wood, steel and aluminum. Advanced materials are becoming popular in new home construction, where they are often used in place of vinyl and wood exterior siding. They also have a myriad of uses in the construction, civil infrastructure and transportation industries.
"The students will learn not only how to work with advanced materials, but the science behind it as well," said John Hauser, director of industry services at Wilkes Community College. "The training center will help us transition our existing workforce to meet the needs of our workers, the industry and the surrounding communities. And what's really exciting is that we're already ahead of the curve in terms of our curriculum, so we're ready to grow with the industry."
Hauser expects the training program to enroll its first students this fall. He is currently working with initiative partners to ensure the curriculum meets the requirements necessary for national industry recognition.
Early partners in the initiative included Martin Marietta Composites, an Alleghany County advanced materials manufacturer, the Duke Endowment, which provided seed funding to complete much of the planning stage of the cluster initiative, and the American Composite Manufacturers Association, a trade group representing the composites industry. More than 30 local, state and regional partners have joined the initiative to date.
Martin Marietta plans to put its 67 employees through the training program as part of its plan to grow the company and spearhead development of the cluster. Hauser and initiative partners expect the cluster to eventually attract five to 10 new material suppliers and two new equipment manufacturers to the region. As the cluster grows and the science involved in manufacturing advanced materials evolves, Hauser would like to see the training center expand its course work to include area high school students.
"Part of the idea behind developing the cluster is to build a critical mass of workers, and that means stabilizing our existing workforce and offering this training as a means of attracting companies that we believe will bring good paying jobs and some prosperity to this region," he said.
Clusters encourage industry growth to feed into the sectors that grow up around the cluster, creating all-important collaborations that foster innovation and lead to future business growth. And though developing an industry cluster can pose unique challenges for rural regions, research shows those efforts pay off for the rural workers who earn on average 13 percent more working for a business located within a cluster.
