The next installment in our Boot Camps: The Student View series brings us to the welding boot camp. For the welding boot camp students, classes have been running for about a month, and their internship experiences are just beginning. Continue reading

Have you been to Moraine Park’s Jackson Regional Center?  If you have, you will know that it’s the home of Moraine Park’s newest and largest welding lab and located in the Northwest Business Park about ½ mile from Hwy 60 and Hwy 45 interchange in Jackson, WI.

Did you also know that there is a high demand for welders in the manufacturing industry?  This is due to the great importance of a welder in the manufacturing process and the number of baby boomers retiring. Continue reading

Manufacturing boot camps have become a staple at Moraine Park over the last four years and continue to keep going strong.  Throughout those four years, we’ve promoted our Manufacturing Skills Academies for their job placement rates and life-changing stories – and we’ll continue to do so. But there’s more to it than that. Continue reading

Moraine Park manufacturing students attended the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago, IL on Sept. 12^th. IMTS is America’s largest manufacturing show, featuring more than 2,000 exhibiting companies. Continue reading

Skills Gap in Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies have realized there is a significant gap between the talent they need to continue to grow their business, and the talent they can actually find. Here in Fond du Lac, Mercury Marine has run into this problem, and is working with Moraine Park Technical College to address these issues. The company has lost a lot of “tribal knowledge” due to retirements and they realized the need to improve the skills of their current employees. Continue reading

On Wednesday, May 11^th, the Integrated Manufacturing Students at Moraine Park Technical College held the championship match of their Techbots Competition.  In the championship match, Flippin Awesome proved to be nearly indestructible against the dangerous Chips Miller.

Continue reading

Manufacturing skills are in high demand and the manufacturing industry continues to expand, Moraine Park Technical College Economic and Workforce Development is giving students the opportunity to gain those skills by offering short-term training boot camps. We often boast about the success of students who leave this short-term training opportunity and go on to succeed, not just in steady jobs, but in careers. We want you to be successful long after you leave, and part of that success comes from finding the right fit in an internship.

What’s the value of an internship?

It’s a chance to show employers your skills, while making sure that they’re a fit for you too. It’s an extended job interview – a chance to shine off paper. It’s an opportunity that could lead to a new future.

But maybe it’s better if you heard it right from the source. Meet our spring 2016 boot campers: Continue reading

Moraine Park’s Integrated Manufacturing Classes are required of students in the Mechanical Design, Process Engineering Technology, and Mechatronics programs.  Students in these programs take the course together and work in cross-functional teams to complete a project.  This year’s project was a Techbot competition.  Four teams in the evening class and four teams in the day class built remote-controlled robots to compete against each other by battling in an 8ft x 12ft cage.  Each team designed and built their Techbot from scratch.  Limitations included a $250 budget and a 15-pound weight limit.

Preliminary rounds were on Wednesday, May 4 for the evening class, and Friday, May 6 for the morning class.

Champions of both classes were crowned, and now the final battle for supremacy between these two Techbot champions will take place this Wednesday night (May 11) for ultimate bragging rights.

So which bots have taken down all other challengers so far?

Drum roll please  … Continue reading

Boot Camp.

For some these two words have a military connotation.

But that’s not who we are.

A google image search will reveal fitness classes with people running, doing pushups, and generally sweating their way to good health.

Moving in the right direction, but with a different kind of fitness.

Part of the Merriam-Webster definition is: “a program or situation that helps people become much better at doing something in a short period of time.”

Spot on. But there’s still more.

What if, when you saw the words Boot Camp, you thought… Continue reading