On a sticky Friday afternoon, Sabrina Betts climbed behind the wheel of the yellow forklift she just earned a certification to drive and fired up the engine. Then, with a smile that never faded, she easily maneuvered the vehicle around the parking lot at Southwestern Illinois College’s campus in East St. Louis.
“Driving the machine makes you feel really cool,” she says. “They’re such heavy machines that you really feel the power in steering them. Almost drives like a boat or a jet ski.”
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The single day forklift training is part of the broader curriculum Betts is learning as a member of Rung for Women’s advanced manufacturing cohort. It’s another skill that she can boast as she looks to start a new career after exiting the full-time workforce years ago to raise her children and working “odd jobs here and there,” she says.
Why It Matters: As regional leaders push for the further development of an advanced manufacturing sector, every additional skill is helpful for people looking to break in, says Rung for Women’s president Leslie Gill. She says her organization, which works to train and prepare women for careers that are set to grow in the region, has partnered with SWIC to provide this training as a way to be responsive to employer needs.
“To come in knowing how to work the machine, it gives you an added benefit,” she says. “It eliminates another training requirement that they might have going into a new field.”
And the St. Louis region has a lot of industrial space, some 300 million square feet, where just knowing how to operate a forklift safely can be a differentiator, Gill says. Plus, there are many facilities, such as retailers and even nonprofits, that use this kind of equipment too.
“It’s a one day certification, which is really attractive for our members,” Gill says. “[Many] are working already. They can’t take a ton of time off work to do several days or weeks of training.”
What’s Next: The new partnership between Rung for Women and SWIC to offer forklift training is a natural starting point for the organizations to work more closely together when it comes to developing programs to train people in the skills employers are looking for. Says Gill: “[Community colleges] can be as nimble as we need them to be, and many of them are now focused on workforce initiatives and helping people re-skill and up-skill in a quicker way.”
