This program seeks to re-align a segment of the Lansing, Michigan-area local school district’s curriculum to better prepare students for some of the best jobs in the community: employment as a UAW member with General Motors.

The United Automobile Workers (UAW) and General Motors Company (GM), through their joint program, the Center for Human Resources (CHR), and in partnership with the Ingham Intermediate School District (IISD), offer a promising approach to solving a serious challenge facing the manufacturing industry: recruiting youth into the automobile industry and, in the process, ensuring that young workers possess the requisite skills to meet the needs of tomorrow’s advanced-manufacturing workforce. This program, inaugurated in 1997, provides young people with a positive introduction to the manufacturing workplace throughout their senior year in high school. The LAMP program is characterized by an employer-driven curriculum, a team-teaching approach, and the active involvement of union members, who pass along their expertise to students through a mentoring system. The program helps prepare young workers for careers in the advanced manufacturing industry.

Workforce Challenge

Understanding the Demand and Meeting it

For many years, the General Motors Company had observed that youth graduating from the local public school system and entering its employ were poorly prepared for the challenges of the workplace. Many of the skills needed by GM revolve around the techniques of lean manufacturing. These skills depend on the application of the concepts of teamwork, problem solving, and effective communication. Because the public educational system tends to be more oriented toward college preparation, these concepts are not necessarily taught directly in the schools.

When the UAW and GM assessed the future, they recognized that “traditional” approaches to secondary education were failing the automotive industry. Consequently, they developed this program to meet their workforce needs. Through the program, they sought to address the mismatch between the aspirations of graduating high school students, the demands of post-secondary education, and the needs of manufacturers in their community.

In the Lansing area, a majority of graduating seniors enrolled in some sort of post-secondary education, yet less than half of those entering post-high school programs completed their degrees or obtained their certificates. At the same time, local manufacturing employers continued to experience skill shortages in key occupations. An undesirable situation for the student, the community, and the employer developed: The students lacked the academic credential they sought; the community suffered the effects of a low return on a large investment in its public schools, including public colleges and universities; and local, high-paying employers continued to have trouble filling their vacancies.

Program Partners

LAMP is managed by an Operations Supervisor and governed by a Policy Board, comprised of the three partners: United Automobile Workers (UAW), General Motors Company (GM), and the Ingham Intermediate School District (IISD).

CENTER FOR HUMAN RESOURCES

The UAW-GM Center for Human Resources (CHR) is a non profit organization that develops and administers joint education, training and retraining activities, as well as specific services for UAW-represented employees throughout the U.S.

Established in 1984 contract negotiations between the UAW and GM, the CHR staff includes UAW-appointed International representatives and GM-appointed salaried representatives. They work with CHR-employed staff for clerical, technical and professional employees to develop, support, and deliver a wide range of programs and activities in four general areas:

Health and Safety
Skill Development and Training
Work and Family
Product Quality Improvement and Promotion

UAW-GM CHR programs and services are dedicated to meeting employee needs, be they work-related, family-related, or for the employee’s own educational development. The CHR also provides education and professional development training for UAW and GM joint program representatives at the local level.

All joint activities and programs, including the UAW-GM CHR, are provided through the national collective bargaining agreement between GM and the UAW.

Program Activities and Methods

Launched in 1997, the LAMP program provides “career exploration for high school seniors interested in exploring the world of manufacturing.” A rigorous application process that begins in the spring of a student’s junior year ensures that applicants to the program are committed to it. The process includes a written essay, an interview, an informational meeting with parents, and a GM-administered drug test. Sixty seniors from 25 area high schools in three counties (Ingham, Eaton, and Clinton) are accepted annually into the program.

The partnership, which integrates classroom instruction and workplace learning, requires that students invest 2 ½ hours of their normal school day in LAMP. The student receives approximately 500 hours of instruction in a workplace environment that provides for the delivery of both academic content and manufacturing concepts.

The model also relies on experienced union members to serve as mentors, advisors, and subject matter experts (SMEs) to the students. Mentors receive training on counseling, tutoring and advising young workers, while imparting the lessons they have learned over the years about how to succeed at work and realize the benefits of union membership.

Shifting Gears (an introduction to the manufacturing system model),
People Systems (communications and career awareness, with an emphasis on the labor movement’s role in the automotive industry),
Business Principles (an introduction to financial aspects of manufacturing – prices, production processes, marketing, etc.),
Manufacturing Systems (an introduction to production concepts, including quality, safety, cost, delivery, and personnel issues),
More than Design (provides a “system view” of design processes and techniques), and Quality Improvement (an introduction to quality standards, quality tools and metrics, and continuous improvement processes).

Throughout the program students are assessed in terms of both traditional academic rigor and their employment competencies. Evaluations are performed jointly by teachers and students. Students receive an A grade when their work is determined to be “quality”. When students fall short of that designation, they continue to work on their project until it meets the quality standard and receives an A.

The LAMP course of study concludes with the “Capstone Experience,” where student-teams face real workplace problems and develop solutions to those problems based on their year of experience in manufacturing. The students then present their research findings to an audience of parents, educators, UAW members, and GM personnel.

LAMP graduates are given special access to Kettering University, formerly known as the General Motors Institute, a prestigious, integrated work-study higher education program focused on math, engineering, and the sciences. LAMP graduates are also given unique access to the highly regulated hiring process at GM. (See the Program Results section for more on these aspects of the program.)

LAMP MISSION STATEMENT

The UAW, GM, and the IISD, in partnership with the public education community, will develop and implement a unique career preparation program, which prepares high school students to enter the workforce of the 21st Century. This will be accomplished by providing an integrated curriculum (classroom instruction and work-based learning experiences) that equips students with lifelong learning skills, employability skills, and manufacturing proficiencies.

LAMP has been developed using national and state content standards, including those formulated by the National Council for Advanced Manufacturing (NACFAM) the Michigan Curriculum Framework (Michigan Department of Education), the Michigan Department of Education Technology Standards, the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), and National Career Development Guidelines.

The jobs that graduates get are among the best in the region. For those who are employed at GM on the production line the base wage rate for an assembler is $25.58 an hour, with excellent benefits.

Connections to the Public Workforce System

The LAMP program makes the most fundamental and basic connection possible to the public “workforce” system; it connects to the nation’s public schools. By virtue of this fundamental connection to the lynchpin of the national workforce system, the program is guided by standards from the State of Michigan’s Department of Education, among others.

The program also connects to Lansing Community College (LCC) through the use of its facilities. As an example, through the partnership between GM and LCC, LAMP students have the opportunity to use resources at LCC’s new Michigan Technical Education Center (M-TEC)

Program Funding Sources

The program was initiated and funded by the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources (CHR), the jointly administered training partnership for the union and the company. CHR invested about $500,000 in the program through a grant to the IISD in its first year. The project was clearly defined as a six-year pilot project. The strains on the auto manufacturer and the union have led CHR to reduce its investment in the program. This academic year (2005-2006), the investment from CHR was around $400,000. The joint program informed the educational partners last year that, because of lost revenue and declining employment in the industry, there will be no funding for the next academic year from CHR. The IISD is pursuing other sources of private and public funding to sustain the successful model – a model that has been replicated in Detroit.

In addition to the time spent governing and overseeing the program, each of the program partners makes in-kind and direct contributions to its success:

Ingham Intermediate School District – IISD’s Career Services and Technical Education Department provides the expertise necessary to develop and implement the integrated curriculum, student materials, and teacher manuals. The two certificated teachers for the program are employees of IISD, with the grant to the school district from CHR covering the costs of the educators.

United Auto Workers – The four local unions of the UAW provide mentors, subject matter experts, and advisors, who interact with students on a regular basis in the context of the workplace.

General Motors Corporation – The employer partner provides access to the workplace, which is an absolutely essential piece of the work-based learning environment. The LAMP classroom is at the UAW-GM Training Center in Lansing. GM’s management personnel are also dedicated to the project through mentoring and advising the LAMP students.

Eaton School District and Clinton School District – The two other school districts that are able to send their students to the program pay $1,000 per student for their participation in the year-long training program.

Barriers Overcome

An early and significant barrier to the success of the program was the fear among parents, educators, and the students themselves that participation in a school-to-career program would ultimately limit a participant’s educational and career options – a problem common to many “work-study” programs.

The program developers had done a lot of thinking about how to design and structure the program to minimize this outcome. And they succeeded. At a number of different stages, the variety of different opportunities available to young people, including LAMP students, is emphasized. The Program Results section, including privileged access to the higher education opportunities at Kettering University, corroborates the effective resolution of this concern about LAMP. Exposure to the industry simply does not predestine the program’s students to careers in the industry. Unfortunately, with the recent declines in employment in the industry, employment opportunities are not even necessarily available in the automotive industry. Employment in the motor vehicles industry hit a 15-year low in July 2005, with only 224,000 jobs (not seasonally adjusted). By way of comparison, there were nearly 300,000 jobs in the industry at the end of 2000 – a 25% drop in less than five years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) determined through extensive analyses that the LAMP experience actually translates into better performance in higher education and other post-secondary education for students. (For more on the AED see below.) Far from limiting participants’ choices, the program opens new doors for students, exposes them to real-life workplaces, and better prepares them for whatever career or educational option they choose. While the manufacturing industry demands results from its investment – and it gets them from LAMP, where graduates tend to enter the world of manufacturing – balance must be maintained when other programs seek to replicate the LAMP model between career exposure and career obligation. The LAMP experience suggests that careful management of school-industry partnerships can be beneficial to both high school students and participating firms. Such a partnership can successfully offer students work exposure and experience without limiting their career options, while creating a reliable pipeline for new workers into advanced manufacturing careers.

Program Results and Returns to Stakeholders/Partners

The benefits of the program have been quantified in a longitudinal study, conducted over a five-year period by the Academy of Educational Development (AED), an independent, non-profit organization founded in 1961, which is part of the National Institute for Work and Learning. The AED study, funded by CHR and published in the summer of 2002, investigated virtually every aspect of the program: its method, its results, and its efficacy. The data presented herein are derived from this study, one of the most comprehensive analyses conducted on virtually any school-to-career program.

The study’s findings are clear: LAMP has flourished since its inception in 1997, producing positive outcomes for all the partners, the participants, and the people of Lansing. The sections below discuss the specific benefits derived by the parties in more detail:

Benefits to the Company:

LAMP assists General Motors by lowering recruitment costs, reducing turnover, and increasing productivity. The program provides a supply of young workers oriented to the challenges of the advanced manufacturing workplace; many IISD seniors find employment at General Motors. Twenty-five percent of the 1999 and 2000 graduates of the LAMP program are working at GM. This figure is particularly interesting in light of the fact that no non-LAMP graduates of IISD from those two graduating classes found employment at GM. The company has also identified other benefits to its broader workforce, such as increased morale. Opportunities to interact with the manufacturing workers of tomorrow connected the existing GM workforce, from both management and the union, with parents, students, and teachers, increasing their sense of the community’s educational needs and their own sense of worth to the community. Additionally, General Motors has adopted part of the LAMP curriculum for its other personnel, borrowing training content from the program (basically from the IISD) and incorporating it into its operations.

General Motors, and the manufacturing industry more broadly, clearly benefit from the positive introduction to manufacturing given to the students from the program. In LAMP’s own internal research, essentially updating the AED data, they discovered that 65-70% of the LAMP graduates are connected to the manufacturing industry, whether that means higher education coursework connected to the industry or actual employment in it. Another element of that updated research revealed that approximately 50 LAMP graduates are employed today at General Motors.

Benefits to the Students:

Students in this program receive a wide array of benefits from their participation. Perhaps most importantly, after 12 to 18 months of employment, LAMP graduates were receiving, on average, $2.26 more an hour than a non-LAMP comparison group. Eighteen months after graduation from high school, LAMP graduates had substantially higher employment rates (82%) than the local employment rate for this group (72%). The program apparently provided an important career path into manufacturing, evidenced by fact that twice as many LAMP graduates were working in the manufacturing sector than their non-LAMP counterparts.

Probably most surprising, however, is the fact that LAMP graduates tend to pursue post-secondary education at higher rates than their non-LAMP counterparts. They also tend to continue in their pursuit of higher education at greater rates. Moreover, academic achievement (cumulative grade point averages) for LAMP graduates is similar to the control group members, although LAMP graduates are more likely to be working while going to college.

Graduates of LAMP are also given privileged status in the highly regulated hiring process at GM. LAMP graduates automatically become part of the eligible pool of applicants for testing for new positions at the manufacturer.

Similarly, LAMP graduates are given special access to higher education opportunities at Kettering University. Kettering University, formerly General Motors Institute (GMI), is a unique program of higher education, offering alternating 12-week work terms with 11-week study terms. The integrated work-study schedule allows a student to earn around $65,000 while obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree. (The University also offers Master’s degrees.) The highly competitive program of higher education focuses on engineering, math, and the sciences. In 2005, only five applicants were accepted into the program. Two of the five positions were granted to graduates of LAMP. Kettering University accepts, for transfer, some of the articulated credit earned by LAMP students at LCC.

As mentioned above, about 50 LAMP graduates are employed at GM today. Most of them are employed as UAW members on the production line, where an assembler makes a base wage rate of $25.58 an hour. A small percentage of the LAMP graduates have moved into the skilled jobs at the company or into management.

Benefits to the Union:

The UAW has benefited in a number of ways from this partnership. First, the program has provided a cost-effective way for GM to recruit new employees to begin careers in the auto industry – where the workforce, as in other manufacturing industries is aging – in the process saving dollars that can be made available for other union priorities. Secondly, increased competitiveness for the company by virtue of the cost savings is a clear result. In the global marketplace for automobiles, every dollar saved can mean a more secure job for a union member, decreasing the likelihood that more of GM’s domestic employment will be sent offshore or outsourced.

Union members who become mentors in LAMP also report high levels of enthusiasm for the program. The union is pleased that the program has received attention from the local news media as a demonstration of the constructive role that labor and management can play together in community and economic development. The union also reports that its relationship with GM on other labor-relations matters has improved as a result of the program.

Finally, a more subtle benefit of the program accrues to the UAW – and to the labor movement more generally. The program has exposed hundreds of students to an unfiltered view of unions in the workplace. LAMP students are more inclined than their non-LAMP counterparts to view unions in a positive light. That fact is borne out in the Academy for Educational Development’s longitudinal study of the program, which determined that 93% of LAMP graduates who had access to a union job actually became members, compared to only 40% of the comparison group in similar circumstances.

Benefits to the School System:

IISD vocational high school programs are able to provide their students with a rewarding vocational learning experience through this program. Students considering the vocational education track in IISD can see that they may be able to find family-sustaining jobs in their own community upon graduation. That knowledge encourages students to choose the learning environment that best suits their aptitudes and interests without fear that it will doom them to a lower standard of living. Offering that choice to high school students contributes to greater success for both the academic and the vocational programs in the schools.

The program has also led UAW members and GM supervisors and managers to become more knowledgeable about, and move involved with, their local school system. This collaborative labor-management partnership within the Ingham Intermediate School District resulting from IISD’s involvement with LAMP has been a clear benefit for the public school partner. Once exposed to LAMP’s positive interaction between the UAW and GM, the teachers union and the school-district management have embarked on their own methods of improving their relationship, collaborating on a wider range of issues than ever before.

Benefits to the Community:

Greater corporate and taxpayer investment and involvement with the local schools is certainly a significant benefit to the community beyond the confines of GM factories. Being able to connect the community’s youth to good jobs in the local labor market prevents a brain drain and ensures local opportunities for the community’s young people. The greatest benefit to the community may be that which motivated the union and the employer to initiate the program: both GM and the UAW recognized that finding qualified workers for auto manufacturing operations contributes to the viability of the industry locally and its good, family-sustaining jobs. Because of the training LAMP delivers, the communities within Ingham County are stronger and better able to withstand the pressures of the global marketplace in automobiles. LAMP has highlighted the critical role that public schools play in economic development and retaining the region’s precious manufacturing jobs.

Next Steps for the Program and/or for the Partnership

The program is exploring closer relationships with institutions of higher education in addition to Lansing Community College. Specifically, LAMP is exploring partnerships with the teaching programs at Olivet College and Michigan State University.

The partners are eager to improve the program by more effectively developing public school personnel for school-to-work strategies. Lastly, LAMP wants to connect its learning strategies more effectively with the students’ home schools, ensuring that the other hours of the school day outside of LAMP re-enforce the lessons learned while at program.

The program has been replicated by UAW and GM in the Detroit area. The IISD is also pursuing other sources of private and public funding to replace the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources investment that was essential to getting the project started.

Lansing Area Manufacturing Partnership (LAMP)

Program Synopsis