Cornell Offers Dairy Career Program to High Schoolers

Cornell to Offer Program to Introduce High Schoolers to Dairy Processing Careers

BY ANIKA ZUBER GIANFORTE

Apply today for jobs starting at $23 an hour!

We’re hiring! No experience necessary.

We had seven interviews scheduled, of the three people who showed up, we hired two. Neither showed up for their first shift.

We are short 25 people.

Sound familiar? Labor was already an issue pre-pandemic because of low unemployment. Now, it has been compounded with the pandemic’s multipronged hurdles. Despite the increasing starting wages across facilities, there are still vast labor issues affecting the dairy processing industry, and current employees are exhausted from the labor shortage. The industry does not need rocket scientists, college degree candidates or candidates with experience; they just need employees who will show up to work. This is proving to be easier said than done, so what can we do about it?

As a Dairy Foods Extension team at Cornell University, our role is to support the emerging needs of the dairy processing industry. Over the past several years, there has been an increased focus on providing support in the area of “workforce development.” One of our key workforce development successes is training existing dairy processing personnel. We are proud to put between 700 to 1,000 incumbent dairy processing employees through our workshops each year. These programs are strong employee development tools for personnel already hired by the industry, but they do not tackle the general labor shortage we see dairy facilities grappling with.

As the number of unemployed persons per job opening is 0.7, the dairy industry is not the only sector grappling to find employees, and there is not an emerging pool of workers for companies to pull employees from. Businesses are left to compete through pay, benefits and/ or by being a great place to work. But, there is a group of work-ready individuals who the dairy industry could put more energy into recruiting: high school students. The reality is that not all graduating high school seniors go to college, and many graduating seniors do not have a dedicated trade they are pursuing. The dairy industry offers many career opportunities for high school graduates who are “work-ready.” After all, dairy is New York State’s number one agricultural industry, and going into the dairy career field opens up many opportunities for employment within the state. Our new pilot program in Western New York focuses on showcasing these opportunities to high school students.

Cornell plans to offer a High School Dairy Processing Boot Camp in June to engage the next generation of dairy processing employees. “Work-ready” graduating high school students will have the opportunity to attend a four-day boot camp with our team. The boot camp will feature both classroom and field time. In the classroom component, students will learn the basics of how milk is processed, the various job opportunities throughout a dairy processing facility, taste dairy product samples and hear from local processor guest speakers. In the field component of the course, students will go on in-person tours of dairy plants in the area. These tours are critical for engaging the interests of the students and are also important for giving participants a frame of reference for what working in a dairy plant environment is like. At the conclusion of the boot camp, local plants have the opportunity to interview students on the spot for open jobs.

Up to 40 students from several school districts will attend our inaugural High School Dairy Processing Boot Camp, and we hope to use this pilot program as a launching point to expand the initiative to more students across different regions of the state. This program will be funded by the Genesee County Economic Development Center and is supported by several school districts there. Promotional materials will be distributed by the schools and are aimed at encouraging student (and parent) interest in the boot camp, which is being held the week prior to area high school graduations.

As we are embarking down the road of more high school collaboration, there

are several things dairy companies should keep in mind if they are interested in harnessing similar opportunities: • Transparency and Engagement:

Facilities need to be more open than ever before when it comes to attracting the next generation of employees. In the world of learning from Chromebooks and social media platforms such as TikTok, our industry can’t afford to exist in an increasingly private bubble.

Fortunately, the dairy industry is gravitating toward more engagement with the public. Virtual or in-person facility tours are great examples of ways to engage with local communities, including potential employees. In our pilot programming, we will be incorporating videos of plants, in-person tours, product tastings and guest speakers from local plants. All of these activities have the intention of resonating well with our local high school audience. • Coordination and Collaboration

Groundwork: This started through a motivated economic development agency in Western New York.

A program such as this pilot has a heavy administrative burden, including coordination with school districts and their schedules, the development of marketing materials to encourage student (and parent) interest, the communication and coordination with the dairy plants and the creation of content for the class time material.

In other words, this program has key costs associated with it. After we launch this program in Western

New York, our hope would be to implement this in other areas of the state, but it will depend on support from the companies in each area. • Respond to Requests for

Information: We are also creating a workforce survey in conjunction with the New York State

Department of Agriculture and

Markets and the Department of

Labor. The goal of the survey is to obtain quantitative data showing how widespread the workforce disparity is across dairy processing plants, which jobs are in highest demand at facilities overall or what starting wages for these positions are. As New York’s land-grant university, we are able to develop programs that can target the industry’s needs, but we require these simple pieces of information.

Please keep an eye out for a survey aimed at acquiring this information, so that we can better assist you in these efforts.

Graduating high school seniors have the potential to immediately start working in a dairy processing facility after graduation and build a strong career for themselves in our industry. With no college debt, the ability to advance and a strong industry community, careers with dairy processors are an option with opportunities for a great future. Our team is excited to show off all the dairy industry has to offer to future dairy processing employees beginning this spring.

Anika Zuber Gianforte is a dairy processing and marketing specialist at Cornell University.