U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui on Friday announced the California Mobility Center won $2 million in federal funding for its Advanced Manufacturing Career Pathways Program.
The program trains people to begin careers in advanced manufacturing at local clean mobility companies.
The funding will help the center create more “equitable jobs in clean technology,” Matsui said in a news conference at the Mobility Center, adding that solving the problems associated with the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is “the defining fight of our lives.”
The program offers technical training for advanced manufacturing jobs, and provides opportunities for underserved populations to get access to careers in electric mobility and clean technology, she said.
The new funding will support programs that are already delivering entry-level workers to Sacramento manufacturers, said Kevin McGrew, director of quality management at Siemens Mobility’s Sacramento train factory. That factory has more than $5 billion in contracts to deliver light rail cars, locomotives and train sets to customers all over North America.
“This program is already built. This program is working,” McGrew said.
Siemens has hired people out of the program, including assemblers, welders and engineering students who went through parts of the program while still attending college, he said.
The training program is essential to the local workforce because the participants are from here, McGrew said.
“They grew up here. They live here, and when we hire them, they stay here,” he said.
“We can’t just go around and hire people from other manufacturers,” McGrew said. “We need to develop them. We need to train them to get the entry-level job,” and then the local manufacturers can train those workers with more advanced skills.
“Getting them to the first level is absolutely fundamental,” McGrew said. “This is not something that is pie in the sky. This is something we are already doing.”
The Sacramento-based mobility center’s members include carmakers, technology companies, utilities, electric grid operators, charging companies and a host of startups that access the center’s ramp-up factory. The Advanced Manufacturing Career Pathways Program is another effort of the CMC.
The mobility center launched the Advanced Manufacturing Career Pathways program in 2020 with city of Sacramento funding that came from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act. The center’s training efforts got another round of $1 million from the city funded by subsequent federal funding.
In addition to creating jobs and careers for local workers, the efforts of the program are also producing workers who will build the products and use the technologies that reduce emissions, said Sacramento City Councilmember and CMC board member Eric Guerra.
Guerra is also a board member of the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District. The Sacramento region has the fifth-worst air quality in the country, and legacy transportation emissions are among the largest contributors to that problem, he said.
The Mobility Center was initiated in 2019 by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which made an initial $5 million investment and committed to up to another $10 million in matching funds.
