BMW kicked off a manufacturing renaissance in South Carolina 30 years ago when it took a chance on a once-proud region in the Appalachian foothills whose fortunes had faded along with textile manufacturing. The German automaker didn’t build just any plant—it built its largest in the world, growing over the years to employ 11K workers.
A decade ago, Greenville Technical College opened a world-class training facility to meet the growing demand for skilled workers—not just from BMW, but also from companies like Michelin, GE Vernova, Vermeer MV Solutions, Bosch Rexroth Corporation, Magna, and Lockheed Martin.
Now Greenville Tech is looking to replicate that investment for a world of manufacturing driven by AI. The college is seeking $30M in funding from the legislature to finish work on a new facility focused on industrial cyber and AI—likely the first community college to embark on such an ambitious project.
The Big Idea: It’s a big bet on a manufacturing future that’s not quite here yet. But advancements in automation and technology, including robots and other forms of AI, are happening fast—meaning ever more students are going to need to learn skills outside of traditional manufacturing programs. Greenville Tech is a pioneer in building a whole center dedicated to industrial cyber and AI, but it isn’t the only one thinking about these shifts. Everett Community College in Washington, for example, recently rolled out programs in industrial cyber.
The focus for the colleges: “What’s the technical workforce going to look like in a decade or two?” says Larry Miller, vice president of learning and workforce development at the college.
A 2022 report from the Community College Research Center, which involved conversations with more than 200 community college administrators, faculty, and staff about allied health, information technology, and advanced manufacturing programs, concluded that colleges are modifying their instruction to adapt to fast-paced technological change. Colleges told them that “many jobs now require the performance of a wider range of tasks and responsibilities than in the past.”
In response, colleges are looking to expand work-based learning programs or create simulated work situations at the colleges themselves. The new Greenville Tech center falls squarely in the latter category.
Skilling Up
Miller says that manufacturing 1.0 involves the knowledge and skills to make something with your hands. Manufacturing 2.0 layers in fixing the robots that automate the work. The new center is preparing students for 3.0 skills, which involves working with and fixing cobots, or robots that work with humans.
A 3.0 technician “also knows how to work with data and information generated from AI systems and knows a little bit about cybersecurity and how to protect the plant from attack,” Miller says.
The Details: Work has already begun on the new center, and it is expected to be complete and fully functioning around 2027. It will eventually house the college’s business and computer technology programs, including cybersecurity, as well as industrial electricity and HVAC labs. They are also considering replicating a smart manufacturing plant layout, where students and industry leaders can work together on analyzing and solving different problems.
“This center here will allow students to learn how to install and maintain the data sensors, collect the information, and utilize artificial intelligence software to develop maintenance schedules that will minimize the downtime and maximize profitability,” says Kelvin Byrd, dean of Greenville Tech’s School of Advanced Manufacturing and Transportation Technology. “We still want to prepare students in the old traditional way, but also incorporate those different skill sets and data analytics into the whole process.”
A big learning curve for students, as well as those already working in the manufacturing industry, is the incorporation of IT and cybersecurity into manufacturing jobs. Traditionally, these are separate departments that prepare students for different kinds of jobs, but the way technology is advancing, Greenville Tech is betting that soon there will be a lot more crossover into the emerging field of industrial cybersecurity.
Phillip Cluley, chair of Greenville Tech’s computer technology department, doesn’t teach robotics, engineering, or automotive courses, but hopes to expand cybersecurity into other programs like these with the new center.
“Anytime you talk about industrial cybersecurity, you’re always looking at not just how do we secure computers, which obviously are always the target of attacks, but how do you protect devices that inherently aren’t computers, don’t often have their own processors, but are connected through some system electronically?” Cluley says.
The new center will focus on other industries, too, such as HVAC. After a recent visit to BMW, the college learned about electricity training requirements needed to build electric vehicles. They took that information back to the college and are now adding that training into the new HVAC and industrial electricity facility.
Conversations with Peers: As Greenville Tech has built out its plans, it’s had conversations with Everett Community College about its industrial cybersecurity program.
Everett is about an hour outside of Seattle and close to Boeing, as well as companies like Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Google. The college has a robust cybersecurity program and an Advanced Manufacturing Training and Education Center, but they have not yet merged these programs the way the new Greenville Tech center aims to do. It is the direction they’re moving in, according to Ryan Masinelli, an instructor in the information technology program at Everett.
“It’s one of these areas where there’s a lot of gray and a lot of overlap,” says Masinelli. “We might not be directly doing manufacturing (in the IT program) and manufacturing students aren’t necessarily learning about servers, but we have this overlap of operational technology and information technology, and that’s where we are growing.”
A Gamble on the Future
With technological advances in manufacturing, particularly AI, being so new, community colleges are gambling a bit on what they think their students will need to know for which jobs. Greenville Tech is not dropping any of their old curriculum just yet.
“We still have a lot of business and industry who are not as advanced as some of the other industry leaders and don’t have a lot of those issues around cybersecurity threats,” says Byrd. “We still want to teach and prepare those students to go out and get those jobs, but we want to build a totally different degree around this and then have it stackable so students can easily transition and advance themselves and obtain different skills.”
Keeping Equity in Mind: As workers in manufacturing and other skilled trades face industry changes that may require them to upskill, there is some concern about who might be left out. Greenville Tech has scholarships and tuition waivers and programs to recruit and retain historically marginalized students, but Byrd worries that those who are already out working in the industries will struggle to find the time to come back to college. He says the college is striving to provide flexible schedules at the new center, including night classes and online classes.
Miller, on the other hand, sees the manufacturing industry changes as a potential way to be more inclusive of students who would’ve been left out previously, including students with physical disabilities. The college has also hired more female instructors and boosted its female student population in the hopes of helping diversify the field.
Shalin Jyotishi, the founder and managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at New America, says there is always a risk of concentration in any technology-driven industrial revolution. But involving community colleges from the beginning can help ensure that changes in industry boost the middle class and don’t just benefit those at the top. Manufacturing especially holds promise.
“In advanced manufacturing, there’s a longstanding belief that workforce development is the mechanism for technology development,” Jyotishi says.
“Equipping workers with digital skills, even though the technologies that would warrant those digital skills aren’t embedded yet, the thinking goes that by graduating folks with more of these skills, manufacturers can accelerate their digitization and boost sluggish productivity levels.”