It isn’t every day the CEO of a Fortune 500 company visits Plaquemine, Louisiana.
But Dow Chairman and CEO Jim Fitterling made the trek from Michigan to River Parishes Community College’s Westside Campus in Plaquemine on Wednesday as part of the Creators Wanted tour, a national campaign aimed at recruiting middle and high school students into manufacturing careers.
Dow is a sponsor of the tour, which is spearheaded by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Manufacturing Institute. The company’s Plaquemine complex, located about six miles from RPCC Westside, is one of Dow’s largest manufacturing sites and one of Louisiana’s largest petrochemical plants.
The groups have scheduled the tour to help fill nearly 700,000 open manufacturing jobs in the U.S. right now. That figure should swell to 4 million by the end of the decade, said Carolyn Lee, president and executive director of the Manufacturing Institute.
In an interview after a speech to dozens of local students, Fitterling admitted the manufacturing sector has a reputation among younger generations as a “dirty, dingy, dangerous” industry.
But he and other officials said much of manufacturing has changed in recent years, including a seismic shift toward digital tools such as 3-D printing and computerized modeling. Fitterling said students are frequently interested in careers in digital technology.
“Before we ever go into a lab to react two chemicals together, we run lots of computer simulations just to make sure what’s going to happen before we ever do anything in the lab,” Fitterling said. “The whole industry is all going digital, and there’s huge opportunities.”
Dozens of students from White Castle High School, Holy Family School and St. John Interparochial School were in attendance to hear the pitch from the tour’s speakers.
In his speech, Fitterling pointed out that manufacturing companies made a wide variety of products, including soaps, detergents, electronic devices, wind turbine blades, solar panels and electric vehicle components.
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