Onondaga Community College will offer a new supply chain management degree, providing students with the skills needed to manage the flow of goods and services that enable companies to transform raw materials into final products.
Anastasia Urtz, OCC provost and senior vice president, said the new degree will be applicable to several industries but “especially Micron.”
“Micron has shared that it anticipates with the chip fabs they will build that, over time, they will need 9,000 direct employees, but then there will be many additional jobs that are in the supply chain that will develop around them,” she said.
The new degree is just one change that local colleges and an economic development organization are planning to help Micron meet its substantial workforce needs in Central New York.
Micron announced in October it has selected White Pine Commerce Park in Clay for a massive computer memory chip plant, the largest in the nation, that will cost up to $100 billion over 20 years and employ up to 9,000 people directly.
In addition to the people employed directly by Micron, the company has said another 41,000 workers will be employed at supply chain companies that will locate nearby.
Micron cited the abundance of colleges and universities in Central New York as one of the reasons it chose the Clay site. Being able to fill the thousands of jobs it creates at the chip fab is important to the development’s success.
In addition to a supply chain management degree, OCC plans to offer a new degree in construction management this fall. Urtz said that degree will be “directly applicable” to a number of major construction projects in Central New York, including the Micron chip fab.
Most of the initial jobs created by Micron will be in construction, and those jobs are likely to be long term because the company plans to build the Clay plant in phases over 20 years.
And those aren’t the only curriculum changes the college is planning in response to Micron’s selection of Central New York for its giant chip plant.
OCC offers degrees in electrical technology and mechanical technology. Since Micron will need workers with training in both electrical and mechanical technologies, the college plans this fall to combine the two into a single two-year degree, as well as a one-year certificate program, Urtz said.
“We’re revising our existing programs to join these together because, essentially, the semiconductor space is one where individuals would do well to have both the electrical skills and the mechanical skills,” she said.
“When you think through how these operations work, they’re robotic technologies. These run 24 hours a day, so there are both machine operators and individual technicians who will be making all of that mechanical infrastructure stay working. It’s all highly skilled fields.”
And while many details are still to be worked out, Urtz said the college is also looking into establishing apprenticeship opportunities with Micron and other employers so students can “earn while learning.”
“We’re trying to offer the best possible opportunity to get as many people as we can access to this incredible moment for us in Central New York,” she said. “We want everybody to have an opportunity to participate.”
To prepare for training students for jobs at Micron, Urtz and other OCC officials traveled in December to a Micron chip plant opened in 2002 in Manassas, Virginia, and also visited Northern Virginia Community College in Manassas and nearby Norfolk State University.
Hargsoon Yoon, director of the Micron-NSU Nanofabrication Cleanroom training facility at Norfolk State University, said the facility helps to train graduate and undergraduate students for jobs in the semiconductor industry.
OCC is making plans to build a similar facility to train students for jobs at Micron and other semiconductor makers.
Micron provided $300,000 toward the more than $10 million cost of building the facility in Norfolk, with much of the rest of the funding coming from the National Science Foundation, Yoon said.
The training provided at the facility is part of bachelor, master’s and doctorate degrees the university offers in electrical engineering, material science, chemistry and other scientific fields, he said.
Though many of the students who are trained at the facility go on to work at Micron, the training provided there is not specific to Micron and often helps students obtain jobs at other semiconductor makers, including Intel, too, he said.
Micron maintains a close relationship with the facility. The company holds job fairs at the school, and Micron officials regularly come to the training center to familiarize students with the work the company does in Manassas, according to Yoon. Micron also provides NSU students with internships, he said.
“We provide a lot of exposure to Micron,” he said.
Central New York colleges are expected to incorporate Micron’s specific needs into their curriculums in the form of new courses, laboratory work and minors added to the backbone of traditional degrees. But college officials say they are offering programs right now that will put students in prime positions to land jobs at the company.
Michael Carpenter, interim dean of the College of Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, said electrical and mechanical engineering and technology degrees offered by the college are aligned with what Micron will be looking for when it begins hiring. So there is no need for students to wait for Micron-specific classes to be announced, he said.
“There are going to be a lot of workers who need to be trained and we have that opportunity for students to come in and find their niche and then move to the one that they prefer and set themselves up really well for their career,” said Carpenter.
Syracuse University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science is planning to expand its student enrollment by 50 percent over the next three to five years to help Micron meet its need for engineering talent, said J. Cole Smith, the college’s dean. The college has 2,450 undergraduate and graduate students, so the expansion will mean an increase of up to 1,225 students.
“When we talked with Micron about the importance of developing the human resources they would need, one of their big concerns was that semiconductor manufacturing is a skill that is not something that a lot of students picked up because of where manufacturing has gone in this country,” Smith said.
The college has already begun hiring more faculty to prepare for the increase in students, he said.
The college does not plan to change its engineering curriculum, but Smith said its classes will likely include trips to Micron’s fabrication facility in Clay to give students a first-hand look at semiconductor manufacturing.
“The great thing about having a partner like Micron nearby is that they are going to supply a lot of facilities at their site that we can leverage,” he said.
CenterState CEO, a Syracuse-based economic development and business leadership organization that helped to recruit Micron to Central New York, is making plans to upscale its Pathways to Apprenticeship program to expand the opportunity for local residents, particularly the unemployed and underemployed, to land construction jobs at Micron.
The 11-week program, launched in 2021, prepares Syracuse residents for apprenticeships in a broad range of construction fields. The training includes instruction in basic construction skills and how to read blueprints. Since its launch, 65 people have gone through the program.
Aimee Durfee, CenterState’s director of workforce innovation, said the organization will partner with building trades unions and Micron to scale up the program to help meet the company’s needs.
In addition, CenterState officials say they are holding discussions with colleges and universities throughout the region on specific programs they can offer to prepare workers for jobs at Micron.
“It’s got to be all hands on deck,” said Dominic Robinson, CenterState’s senior vice president of inclusive growth.
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