Performance First: L3Harris Greenville beefs up talent pipeline through school partnerships.
On a quest to fill key roles and create a long-term, steady pipeline of local talent, the L3Harris team in Greenville is rewriting its playbook for talent acquisition.
For more than 70 years, the Greenville site has been a key player in providing modernization, upgrade, sustainment and maintenance for government and military aircraft. With that mission at the forefront, Greenville’s touch labor force, including 900-plus aircraft mechanics, play a vital role.
Site leadership has worked towards solutions for attrition in some of those key spots. That search led them to partner with local K-12 schools, a local junior college, government leaders, workforce partners and its own bargaining unit to establish what they hope will provide a steady stream of candidates from their own backyard.
“Understanding the company’s need for a highly skilled workforce, we needed a structured training approach designed for L3Harris utilizing our local talent,” said Craig Driggers, Director Operations Management, Manufacturing COE. “We were experiencing high turnover in our aircraft maintenance positions. The data we had on attrition showed our employees that were leaving were not tied to Northeast Texas.”
Getting the ball rolling on such a significant change is another example of IMS employees embracing the Performance First mindset. To enact meaningful change, the Greenville team embraced the beliefs of One Team and even expanded the team outside the company to
include its local bargaining unit and several government agencies. The team also committed to Embrace Change by fundamentally changing the way it populates the talent pipeline for certain positions.
Driggers said he began by reaching out to local school districts and Paris (Texas) Junior College, which has a campus in Greenville. The team took a hard look at Career Technology Education and STEM programs offered in area schools and realized local students were closer to a career with L3Harris than they probably realized.
“We realized the learning curve was minimal with what was being taught at our local schools,” said Driggers. “We could see the opportunity for L3Harris to obtain a better trained workforce while partnering with our local schools and offering kids an opportunity for a career path with a Fortune 500 Company.”
Company leaders hosted tours over the next nine months with local schools that included CTE/STEM students along with career counselors.
“We wanted the students and counselors to see the opportunities our company offers – the jobs, positions and careers that are local to our community,” said Driggers.
Additionally, Driggers was appointed to the Texas State Board with the North Central Texas Council of Governments providing opportunities to work for state funded grants for Aircraft Maintenance training. This resulted in L3Harris working with Paris Junior College to create pre-apprentice and full apprenticeship programs covering critical touch labor skills.
The company and college worked to complete curriculum development for the programs, local Department of Labor representatives helped to certify the apprenticeships and the company signed new language with UAW 967 to allow apprentices to be covered within the CBA.
Since the effort began, L3Harris has hosted two hiring events with local schools that has yielded the company 27 new employees in aviation.
The new PJC Workforce Training Center opens August 2024 and will offer the Airframe Mechanic Program with Level 1 and Level 2 Certificates and an Associate of Applied Science. PJC will add space at a hangar at Majors Field, the site of L3Harris Greenville, to build out the program. |
