He could be talking about anything – laptop computers, smartphones, smart TVs, lawnmowers and, yes, the manufacturing of automobiles.

“If you don’t adapt yourself to the technology, the technology will get you at some point,” said Ilker Subasi, manager of training and development at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga.

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Today’s advent of electric vehicles (EVs) has only expanded this truth. Now more than ever, auto manufacturers have to continually raise the bar of their workforce training – whether that’s classes offered to high school students who might one day become employees, new hires just learning the ways of a company or current workers returning to hands-on classrooms to learn the latest in EV technology.

This will be true for Ford’s operation at the Megasite of West Tennessee in Haywood County, too, where the company is pouring $5.6 billion into an EV and battery campus, Blue Oval City, that will churn out electric F-series trucks.

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But even existing auto plants in the Mid-South are making huge commitments to training workers – whether building conventional gas-powered cars, to accommodate new EVs or to simultaneously produce both on the same assembly line.

The latter is the case at the General Motors Spring Hill plant south of Nashville. Workers on the line will be alternating between gas-engine vehicles and the 2023 EV Cadillac LYRIQ.

Jeffrey LaMarche, executive director of the GM plant in Spring Hill, is amazed at the speed that innovative technologies are being implemented into all OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).

He also can’t help but think of his late father, George LaMarche, who was on the assembly line with GM in Detroit.

“My dad would tell me the story about his very first job at General Motors, how he would tack up headliners (the ceiling fabric coverings inside vehicles),” LaMarche said. “He’d climb in a vehicle, with a little wooden stool and a little hammer and a mouthful of tacks.”

The reality of working the line in the 1960s and 1970s was that it was not for the faint of heart or frail of body.

“Being on a body marriage job, where you drop the body onto the frame, those were brutally tough jobs,” LaMarche said. “It took big people.

“And then as they got better technology over the years, you didn’t have to be somebody that looked like a defensive lineman.”

Back to school

Today, it is all about the strong of mind.

In Chattanooga, VW founded its Volkswagen Academy in 2010 and modeled it after successful Volkswagen apprenticeship programs in Germany.

The Academy is two-pronged: a training program designed to strengthen the Volkswagen workforce with new skills, and the training for new hires. There is also curriculum for high school students interested in studying mechatronics.

Volkswagen Academy is critical in training workers for the EV ID.4, which first went on sale in Germany last spring. Pre-production has started in Chattanooga.

Subasi emphasizes that “safety is first” and then the focus shifts to “basic and advanced electrics, and then we go into different levels of high voltage training.”

VW also has partnered with Chattanooga State and other colleges.

In Blue Springs, Mississippi, near Tupelo, Toyota has partnered with Itawamba Community College and trainers from the plant also have taught at the Haley Barbour Center for Manufacturing Excellence at the University of Mississippi.

“It’s not just helping auto manufacturing, but manufacturing more broadly in the region,” said Scott Kilpatrick, interim director of the program at Ole Miss. “Our own students have been able to intern (at Toyota) or even work there full-time. They come back, and you see the lightbulb go on, the passion.”

David Fernandes, Toyota’s plant manager in Blue Springs, says the Advanced Technician Maintenance Program at Itawamba has proved to be something of a farm system for the company: “It’s not a perfect term, but it kind of allows us to grow our own.”

Toyota also sponsors training classes for high school students: “The Creative Future.”

“It’s almost like an internship,” Fernandes said. “Not everybody is going to go to a four-year college. You come here, in manufacturing, and have a good career.”

The Volkswagen Academy also offers an option for young people interested in a career right away.

“In Germany, they might go to school and choose a trade early on,” said Amanda Plecas, communications manager at the Chattanooga plant. “The American education system is different.”

At Volkswagen Academy, students learn about high voltage systems on the vehicle and trainers teach them about how the battery in an electric car differs from a standard internal combustion engine model. Training also includes advanced robotics and the standard language of robotics.

Typically, VW says, apprentices (or, in many cases, robots) weld with steel. But for the EV batteries, they learn how to weld with rubber on an aluminum frame which will be placed in the underbody of the vehicle. Current Volkswagen employees are also eligible to take the new courses.

“Everybody in the (Chattanooga) plant will have to go through a mandatory computer-based high voltage and electro mobility awareness training,” Subasi said.

At GM in Spring Hill, the training operations center has computers and several stations for hands-on training. It’s a mini plant in 16,000 square feet of warehouse space. The idea for workers: to look into the future and the new vehicle they will be making there.

“They see what it’s going to be, get a little bit of repetition and go through the process so when they go to the line, they’re not seeing it for the first time,” said Jonathan McPike, the plant’s manufacturing engineer manager.

“Our folks in here now training to build the (all-electric) Cadillac LYRIQ, part of the training they go through is completely digital,” LaMarche said. “Everything is designed in three dimensions … by having that, you can create these models and build a vehicle in a virtual world.

“They can sit at a computer you set up that has the parts just for their station, and they’re seeing the three-dimension picture of their tools, their parts, and you’re teaching them how to build the vehicle before you ever touch a piece of hardware.

“That’s what helps you shrink lead time and helps you find issues.”

A match made in manufacturing

In 2007, Toyota announced it was locating in Blue Springs. The region had previously been flush with furniture manufacturing plants. But as many of those facilities closed, the business going across the water to China, the region needed new industry.

Toyota brought it and changes in the labor force.

“It made better training for our other industries, robotics and industrial technologies,” said Randy Kelley, executive director of the Three Rivers Planning and Development Alliance.

“There have been books written about the `Toyota Way’” said David Rumbarger, president and CEO of the Community Development Foundation in Tupelo. “It’s a system of manufacturing – total quality improvement, continuous improvement. It just has a different mentality.

“So when they came to town, every manufacturer had to get better. And that was a challenge. It was a good challenge.”

It required a turn of mind even for people happy to now be employed by the colossal corporation from Japan.

“It’s hard with an international company coming into a small community, trying to train them in a very different way of working,” said Kim Caron, owner of The Caron Gallery, and a long-time Tupelo resident.

“But people are very loyal here once they understand your different work concepts and procedures. They’re gonna work hard and stay with you.

“You always hear, `Oh, Mississippi’s last in everything.’ But the people are the salt of the earth.”

Have job, will travel

If the job is good enough, people will drive for it. That was a point Rumbarger made when presenting to Toyota and backing the claim with numbers that showed within a 60-mile radius there were more than enough qualified workers to staff the plant.

So whether it’s Toyota in Blue Springs, GM in Spring Hill or Volkswagen in Chattanooga, some workers are driving 90 minutes, or more, each way for the opportunity at a higher wage than they might otherwise earn in another position elsewhere.

Mike Rayburn is facilities manager for GM in Spring Hill, and he transferred from Detroit in the 1980s when GM was locating a Saturn plant there, opening it in 1990.

Initially, he says, GM brought in mostly transfers from Ohio and Michigan.

“That created some consternation,” Rayburn said. “That changed over time; probably over 50% of our hiring is local now.”

Likewise, when VW came to Chattanooga in 2008, there were many transfers from Michigan. But today the metrics have shifted, says Charles Wood, vice president of economic development at the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce.

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“I don’t have exact numbers,” he said. “We did do an analysis, and probably two-thirds were from Hamilton County. But it’s a regional draw, make no mistake.”

Wood added: “Everyone questions workforce right now. It doesn’t matter where you are. Whether you’re in Tampa or Tupelo, the ability to hire is a challenge. That’s true in Nashville and true in Chattanooga.

“In the past, OEMs, original equipment manufacturers, they wanted their employment to be 1% of the total metro employment number,” he continued. “So, if you had 100,000 people in your workforce and they’re going to hire 1,000 people, they feel good about it. But if you have 50,000 people, and they’re going to hire 1,000 people, they didn’t feel good about that.

“That’s what’s going to be interesting for the Ford site,” Wood said, “because it’s farther removed from the two metros in Jackson and Memphis. They’re gonna have to be pretty aggressive as they’re courting employees from those two areas.”

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Ford should find many people who are receptive. In the present economy, quasi-post-pandemic, workers have more leverage in determining what they will do and where they do it. No doubt, people will leave other, lower-paying positions to work at Blue Oval City.

Rumbarger notes that when Toyota opened, the mean entry level salary was $13.75 an hour and has gone up to $15.75 an hour.

“That’s money in people’s pockets,” he said. “Tax receipts have grown for all the communities in this region.”

What matters most

Subasi, who is manager of training and development for VW in Chattanooga, calls the Volkswagen Academy’s training center “its own ecosystem.”

It is there where students learn the skills to become employees, and those already on the VW payroll will receive, as the company likes to tout it, “uptraining” to keep pace with evolving technology and the enhanced skillsets required.

To Subasi, it’s all part of a simple fact that he always takes seriously: If you don’t adapt, the technology will get you.

And that means your competitors will beat you.

“You can have the best equipment, highest tech, but if you don’t have workforce that knows how to run it, it’s a waste,” he said. “The key is a very skilled workforce.”