From left, Todd Tranum, the Manufacturers Association of the Southern Tier’s executive officer, and Shawn Hricko, manager for the Cummins Jamestown Engine plant, welcomed stakeholders and interested community members Wednesday for the launch of a “Dream It Do It” program. P-J photo by Christopher Blakeslee

Western New York is a mecca of sorts for the manufacturing industry.

With numbers forecasted to continue reaching the billions of dollars mark, a highly skilled and trained labor force is more important now than ever — a fact not lost on some within the industry.

To help achieve a pipeline into the manufacturing field, the Manufacturers Association of the Southern Tier on Wednesday announced the official launch of a school-aged learning and recruiting pipeline program at the Cummins Jamestown Engine plant.

“The Dream It Do It program is a work ethics credential components program,” said Todd Tranum, MAST executive officer. “This will hopefully help with the growing need for quality employees to fill our skilled workforce requirements, to feed the growing and expanding manufacturing market in Western New York.”

MAST is reporting that manufacturing in the region as a growing economy engine, with the area hosting 1,615 different facilities, more than 70,000 people employed, $4.6 billion in payroll and benefits packaging and a $26 billion in annual shipping of finished product revenues.

One of the beneficial elements of the program is to provide a stream of qualified applicants to fill the void of workforce ready employees, along with incentivizing appropriate school behavior and academic achievement.

“There’s always room for improvement,” said Shawn Hricko, local Cummins plant manager. “This program will hopefully enforce some of the qualities we’ve seen lacking in a recent trend of some of those coming out of high school. Such as punctuality, high self-standards in quality of work, resiliency with challenges, problem solving skills, critical thinking and other intangibles.”

Moreover, the “Dream It Do It program” will target the 13- to 18-year-old demographics and partner with local area school districts to provide a two-way street of communication not only with the schools, but the individual identified students as well.

“Enrolling our students with the Dream It Do It Advanced Manufacturing program provides an opportunity to create stronger connections to manufacturing pathways, rewards students for their school-based work and engagement in hand-on programming through Dream it Do it and builds engagements directly with the manufactures,” said Rachel Curtin, Chautauqua Lake Center School principal.

While the program isn’t new to Cummins, it’s something the Jamestown plant manager is excited to be part of.

“There’s some of the other plants I’m aware of that have the Dream It Do It program,” Hricko said. “However, I’m excited for it to be here. Cummins wants all our plants to be invested in our communities. To have a healthy plant we need to have healthy communities and we’re proud to be a part of this.”

For more information on the program contact, Melissa Himes at 716-450-2170.