ManufacturingWorks
ManufacturingWorks is a collaborative between Instituto and the City of Chicago’s Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development.  ManufacturingWorks is a centralized service center for employers that responds to the growing concern over the insufficient number of skilled workers in the Chicago manufacturing industry.  Instituto serves as the fiscal agent and lead managing and operational organization for ManufacturingWorks.  Instituto also chairs the steering committee and the human resources development committee for the program.

ManufacturingWorks works with companies to:

• Identify skill-gaps among the existing workforce and align them with coordinated training programs
• Identify skill sets of hard-to-fill manufacturing positions
• Explore Lean Manufacturing principles as gateways to greater productivity

Last year, ManufacturingWorks successfully helped employ 530 individuals at nearly 130 Chicagoland companies.

“ManufacturingWorks has done an outstanding job of placing people at our facility.  They sent us 9 candidates for recent openings and we hired 7 of them.  We couldn’t achieve that kind of interview-to-hire ratio without them.

Dottie Pigozzo, Vice President of Human Resources
Azteca Foods, Inc.

“The time, dedication and focus that ManufacturingWorks put into identifying the right candidates has helped Kraft hire 145 new workers.  Their ability to expedite and streamline the selection process has resulted in significant dollar savings in advertising costs and the time of the Kraft Management group.”

Amy Wood, Human Resources Manager
Kraft Foods

ManufacturingWorks was a featured as a best-practice case study in the Summer 2007 issue of “Sectoral Strategies for Low-Income Workers: Lessons from the Field,” published by The Aspen Institute Workforce Strategies Initiative.

For more information on Manufacturing Works, email us at idpl.manufacturing.works@idpl.org
or call us at 773.523.2516.

Instituto del Progreso Latino | 2570 S. Blue Island | Chicago, Ilinois 60608 | Phone: (773) 890-0055 | Fax: (773) 890-1537
© 2008 Instituto del Progreso Latino. All rights reserved.