Manufacturing Day 2024: Demystifying Careers in Advanced Manufacturing
NextFlex, in collaboration with NIST, held a discussion on dispelling the myths of Advanced Manufacturing. Some common manufacturing myths are: manufacturing is dirty and dangerous; manufacturing is unskilled; manufacturing means long hours and being underpaid; manufacturing is working on an assembly line. Our moderator, Brad Conrad, guided a discussion around these and other myths to provide current and real answers to help show that manufacturing is a viable career choice for anyone, regardless of their background.
Moderator:
Dr. Brad Conrad is the Education and Workforce Development Manager within the Partnerships and Outreach Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Office of Advanced Manufacturing (OAM).
Brad received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland – College Park and a B.S. in physics with a minor in history from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
Panelists:
Ms. Courtney Power is the Deputy Director of Workforce Development at NextFlex. She “grew up” managing people and projects as an Air Force aircraft maintenance officer then Air Force program manager.
Now, she is able to use her skills and her passion for education, STEM, and service to support underserved and underrepresented students in connecting with and developing an interest in advanced technology and manufacturing.
Learn more about Courtney here.
Dr. Courtney Taylor is the Executive Director of Mississippi’s Office of Workforce Development, Accelerate MS. Their mission is to engineer and continuously improve a state-wide, fully integrated talent development system where Mississippians excel in our dynamic, globally connected economy through effective awareness-building, education, training, and job placement services valued by employers.
Learn more about Courtney here.
Dr. John D. Williams describes his job as the lead engineer and co-developer of a research and development (R&D) team at The Boeing Company. But the description, and his official title of Technical Fellow, fails to do justice to what he does, and why he does it, for the giant company. Boeing designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide.
Dr. Christina Jones is currently a Research Chemist in the Organic Chemical Metrology Group where she leads programmatic efforts focused on quality assurance and quality control for metabolomics, a tool for precision medicine. Her work involves developing quality assurance and quality control materials and data to improve the comparability of metabolomics measurements across all sectors of the metabolomics community.