EVOLVE Business and Professional Magazine April 2017 | Page 13

Those same questions are incredibly important in Volusia
County, where over 450 manufacturing companies provide
approximately 12,000 jobs and account for 5 percent of the
economy. According to the Volusia Manufacturers Association
(VMA), founded in the 1980s to unite manufacturers across
Volusia and Flagler Counties, understanding that there are
important changes on the horizon as digital-cyber technologies
become more embedded in manufacturing is not the problem—it
is a matter of when, not if. The problem is the public’s awareness
and the current need for Fourth Industrial Revolution skill
sets. In fact, several Volusia firms have reported that one of the
critical reasons why they have not grown as fast as they would
have liked is because they cannot find the employees with the
knowledge, skills, and abilities they need. For Volusia County
to prosper and fulfill the promise of an increasingly high-tech
manufacturing sector, the labor force must increase both in
expertise and in mass.
On the expertise side of things, schools and colleges are
looking for students to educate and train in areas critical
to manufacturing. Many high school science, technology,
1
engineering and math programs dedicated to relevant disciplines
are being formed. For example, Mainland High School recently
hosted a robotics competition, and the award winning Academy
of Information Technology and Robotics at Spruce Creek High
School is laying the groundwork to become a standalone charter
school. At the higher education level, Daytona State College
(DSC) was recently awarded a four-year $3.7 million TechHire
Partnership Grant from the United States Department of Labor
to invest in programs that cover Information Technology (IT)
certifications and machine maintenance. They have also recently
been granted a bachelors program dedicated to Engineering
Technology. The new Congressman John Mica Engineering and
Aerospace Innovation Complex, or the The MicaPlex, for short,
has a laboratory and wind tunnel, and will anchor the 90-acre
Embry-Riddle Research Park, which will seek to attract more
research labs. The MicaPlex will be a 50,000-square-foot hub,
adjacent to Embry-Riddle’s Daytona Beach Campus with 10,000
square feet of lease space as part of a collaborative platform for
incubating new technologies.
Though these are encouraging resources, DSC, for example,
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/
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