MAU Awarded South Carolina's Chamber Of Commerce Workforce Innovator

MAU Workforce Solutions received the South Carolina’s Chamber of Commerce’s Workforce Innovator Award for the large employer category at the 2018 Workforce Development Symposium on October 30, 2018.

The Chamber recognized MAU and two other companies that “use their own resources and ingenuity to address the skills gap and help create a South Carolina workforce of the future by implementing innovative private sector solutions,” the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce said in a press release earlier this year.

The Chamber selected MAU for it's Skill School, a state-of-the-art training facility that focuses on certifying forklift operators and enhancing their skills.

In 2014, MAU began seeing the challenge its clients were facing with the growing skills gap, particularly when trying to find experienced material handlers/forklift operators. To combat this, MAU created the Skill School in a warehouse facility behind MAU’s Greenville, S.C. building.

With the ever-growing need for trained forklift drivers, MAU further invested in their program and grew the facility from the warehouse space building to a larger building with more than 22,000 square feet of space dedicated to training candidates. The new Skill School facility opened it's doors in 2017.

With the expanded facility, MAU developed three defined programs to train candidates of various skill levels on different types of equipment.

• Forklift Qualification Course: Assess a candidate’s ability to operate a forklift based on client’s job description and qualification
• Fundamentals Course: Provide knowledge and instruction using practical exercises to develop the fundamental skills to competently operate a forklift
• Enhancement Course: Improve competency and job readiness for new hire material handlers, in a controlled environment, using both scenario and equipment training

Skill School maintains an open door policy for companies using this service. MAU invites them into the facility to provide feedback for continuous improvement and to add flexibility to the program. For example, the Skill School is able to alter the driving course, packaging, or types of equipment depending on each customer’s needs.

With more than 3,000 individuals trained by the Skill School in the Upstate, this has been a solution to the skills gap, and the benefits have been numerous:

• Benefits to clients:
• Yields new employees that are ready to work and trained specifically for the job
• Provides a more productive, knowledgeable, and, most importantly, safer workforce
• Provides both cost and time savings for the employer, as they do not have to conduct the training onsite
• Benefits to the employee:
• Starting a new job can be stressful; this helps them walk in on day 1 ready to perform safely and at higher levels of performance
• Improves safety, competency, and job readiness for new hire material handlers, in a controlled environment, using scenario and equipment training
• Improves time - upwards of 60 percent improvement to complete a drill on equipment at the completion of the Skill School program