Missoula College Brings Workforce Training Into the Right-now Age

A few years ago, Brent Campbell faced a vexing challenge. Business was booming at WGM Group http://www.wgmgroup.com/, the Missoula design and engineering firm where he served as CEO. Yet despite offering good wages — not to mention an office overlooking the Clark Fork River — in a city where quality middle-class jobs often attracted dozens of applications from across the country, WGM Group could not find qualified computer-aided design (CAD) workers.

This was no momentary drought in the labor pool. For years, local architecture, engineering and design firms struggled to keep their CAD desks fully staffed with professionals trained in the computer technology.

"We were ending up hiring people with a four-year degree in history and teaching them ourselves to be CAD technicians," Campbell recalled. "It was all on-the-job training. It’d take two years and then some of them would end up leaving and we would have to start over again. It was a constant challenge."

So Campbell approached Missoula College http://www.cte.umt.edu/ — then known as The University of Montana College of Technology — to ask if the school could create an educational program to fill that local need.

Three years later, the college graduated its first class of students with a Certificate of Applied Science in Computer Aided Design.

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