SOUTHFIELD, Mich., Sept. 11, 2023 — AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology and SME introduced a strategic partnership at the moment, making greater strides collectively towards fixing North America’s manufacturing workforce challenges. The two organizations have been longtime collaborators on advancing manufacturing, and this partnership focuses on leveraging the strengths and sources of every group for the betterment and development of the trade by way of three key areas: workforce improvement, academic services and pupil occasions.

A key cornerstone of this partnership included welcoming Greg Jones, former AMT vp, Smartforce Development, to the workforce improvement staff of SME as di-rector, strategic packages and partnerships, the place he’ll report back to Jeannine Kunz, chief workforce improvement officer at SME.

“Workforce development continues to be one of the most important factors affecting our members and the manufacturing community, so it makes sense to combine our forces in this area to scale solutions,” stated Douglas Okay. Woods, president and chief govt of-ficer at AMT. “Greg Jones has dedicated his career to this effort and now joins forces with Jeannine Kunz and her team at SME to accelerate their collective impact.”

AMT’s training services will now be owned and operated by SME, which is able to leverage the prevailing power and trade management of Tooling U-SME, the group’s workforce improvement space. The AMT packages migrating to SME embody the Certified Manufacturing Technology Sales Engineer (CMTSE) program, the MT Sales Fundamentals program, and extra AMT e-learning merchandise within the space of transformational applied sciences. They will stay obtainable to AMT members and to the manufacturing neighborhood extra broadly by way of Tooling U-SME. Both organizations acknowledged the chance to include AMT’s training services into the expansive studying and improvement options of Tooling U-SME, which embody its highly effective studying administration system. This offers producers with better worth by way of one entry level to a bigger and extra built-in answer to satisfy their wants. 

“This is a key indicator of our belief that unprecedented collaboration is required at this time to fully address the current and near-term education and workforce development challenges facing manufacturers in North America,” Kunz stated. “There are a tremendous number of valuable programs happening across the United States, and the more we can amplify, align, and strengthen one another, the more impactful we can be for individuals, educators, employers, and communities.”

AMT is well-known for its expansive IMTS – The International Manufacturing Technology Show, which is held each different 12 months in Chicago and the place the Smartforce Student Summit convenes. The Smartforce Student Summit is devoted to showcasing the manufacturing know-how classroom of the long run to educators and college students by way of a fascinating, hands-on, and memorable expertise. Serving over 100,000 college students and educators through the years, the Student Summit is designed to encourage college students to hunt an training pathway in STEM and make them a profession in manufacturing.  

The Student Summit aligns strongly to SME’s mission as nicely, and it’s no shock that SME and AMT recognized coproducing the Student Summit at IMTS 2024 as one other im-portant pillar of its announcement to associate in workforce improvement.

“Expanding our existing partnership with AMT on producing the MT Series and Smart Manufacturing Experience events to include collaborating on workforce development is exactly what nonprofits should continuously aim to do when it benefits the industry,” stated Bob Willig, govt director and chief govt officer at SME. “We are particularly ex-cited to work with AMT on coproducing the Smartforce Student Summit at IMTS 2024 centered around our shared vision for the ‘manufacturing technology classroom of the future.’”