Training Wheels - Out to Lunch - It's Baton Rouge

One of the biggest challenges in Louisiana is a lack of skilled
workers in the technical trades. Companies complain about it all
the time. And yet, many young people will tell you they can t find
a good paying job, which is a reason so many of them leave after
high school. For the past several years, the business community in
south Louisiana has been focused on this dynamic. On this edition
of Out to LUnch, Stephanie Riegel uncovers some promising
developments in correcting this trend. Stephen Toups is Executive
Vice President of Turner Industries, one of the largest and most
successful industrial construction firms in Baton Rouge. Turner
Industries was founded in 1961, and builds and maintains services
in the heavy industrial sector. It has locations across the Gulf
Coast, more than 11 thousand employees in the Baton Rouge area
alone over 20,000 in total and more than 3 billion in gross
revenues. Stephen has been at the company for more than 20 years.
His dad, Roland Toups, leads the company as CEO and chairman.
Stephen is also active in the community in business and civic
organizations, and is particularly involved in the effort to help
train workers not only for the area s many expanding chemical
plants and industrial construction firms, like his, but also in the
computers sciences and med tech. Summer Dann is Executive Director
of the East Baton Rouge Career and Technical Education Center,
which opens in the fall on the campus of the Ardendale urban
village in Melrose East. CTEC is one of the most exciting things
happening in Baton Rouge, with the potential to affect real change
by offering high school juniors and seniors the opportunity to earn
a diploma from their regular high school while also receiving
workforce training and industry certification in high demand fields
that need skilled workers. Summer is getting this dual enrollment
academy off the ground building programs, hiring faculty, figuring
out how to make it all come together. She comes to the position
from ITI Technical College, where she was dean of students for many
years. Baton Rouge doesn t appear at the top of many lists. But it
s in the vanguard of workforce change with the advent of the
cooperation of the education system, private industry, and
government to bring about real worforce change and manufacturing
growth. Photos over lunch at Mansurs On The Boulevard by Karry
Hosford.

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