Giving Compass' Take:

• Cook Medical is an Indiana-based medical technology company that partners with higher education institutions to train its employees to address current skills gaps in the company.

• How can donors expand employer-educator partnerships that aim to increase career paths for individuals?

• Read more on the workforce development guide for donors

Cook Medical is a large, privately held medical technology company headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana. Cook Group (the parent company of Cook Medical) employs about 12,000 employees worldwide, many of whom work in the manufacturing of minimally invasive medical devices, the company’s core business.

In this post, Dan Peterson, vice president of industry and government affairs at Cook Group, shares his perspective on the company’s challenges and solutions with respect to building a robust workforce. Like the other employers in this series, the skills gap poses a significant challenge for Cook. The company’s strategy for addressing the skills gap is largely anchored in partnerships with educational institutions, a strategy highly recommended by experts, as discussed throughout this series.

Peterson’s experience at Cook illustrates that the impact of technology on manufacturing is more complicated than the replacement of human jobs by machines or artificial intelligence. On the one hand, it is the case that technology is reshaping the terrain of work. Many types of skills that humans used to perform will likely be mechanized, and in the long term, remaining competitive in the labor market will likely require a different skill set than in prior generations. Peterson acknowledges that in medical device manufacturing, as in many industries, technological advancement can mean “the ability to manufacture more and better products with fewer employees.”

Peterson describes how Cook has developed strategies aimed at skills and education development among adults without a high school diploma or equivalent degree. This is an important focus area for Cook, as Peterson explains that the entry-level requirement for the “majority of our manufacturing operators” is a high school diploma or high school equivalency (HSE)–formerly known as a GED.

Read the full article about addressing the skills gap through education by Elizabeth Mann at Brookings.