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Minnesota Technology Magazine - Winter 2007

Employer of Opportunity

Owatonna-based Viracon collaborates with a state college on an innovative new employee-training initiative.

Jim Wendorff,Viracon

—Suzy Frisch
Photograph by Pat Kelly.

Business has been booming during the last few years at Viracon, an Owatonna- based architectural glass fabricator. It’s been so busy, in fact, that the company has been having trouble recruiting enough employees to maintain its rapid growth. One of the biggest pools of potential workers is Latino and African immigrants, and the company has been happy to hire them and move them up the ranks. As with many immigrants, however, those workers sometimes lack English language- and specific job-related skills, which hampers their advancement and the company’s growth.

The solution: Viracon teamed up with Austin-based Riverland Community College on a pioneering new training project. As a first step, the pair applied for and received a $284,000 grant from the Minnesota Job Skills Partnership Board (MJSP) for its “Employer of Opportunity” training program. (Note: The MJSP provides grants to institutions that partner with businesses to develop new-job training or retrain existing employees; MTI also recently received an MJSP grant.) The Riverland /Viracon grant will help create a program to assess the skill levels and aptitudes of interested employees. The partners will then develop classes and training programs to fit individuals’ needs and abilities. They expect to work with about 250 people at Viracon during the three-year program.

Through the grant, Viracon and Riverland hope to move employees from entry-level material handling positions into more skilled jobs, such as quality assurance technicians, machine and robot operators, electricians, and supervisors. In addition to hands-on technical training, the program will teach English, communication skills, and life skills, such as how to open a bank account or take advantage of Early Childhood Family Education and other community resources.

Without a training program like this to recruit and retain minority employees, Viracon would have to grow its business in Georgia and Utah instead, where it has other facilities. “We would have been hamstrung a bit with finding enough people to fill our positions,” says Jim Wendorff, the company’s vice president of human resources. “Without this workforce that we have in our region, it would have limited our growth in Owatonna and Minnesota.”

For Riverland’s part, it wanted to help Viracon find ways to recruit and retain a strong workforce, says Kari Busch, a business consultant for Riverland’s Training and Development division. The college also gets the opportunity to develop a new training model that it can share with other companies in the region and throughout the state.

In the end, the program’s benefits will stretch from individual employees to Viracon, Owatonna, and Minnesota at large. “This allows people to fully participate in the economy and set some roots down,” Wendorff says. “It is a win-win for our company, for employees, and the community.”