Earlier this week, eighth graders at West Side Middle School sat gathered around in a classroom with Rick Schutt, director of community engagement at Thor Industries, discussing possible career paths in the “RV Capital of the World.”
“Marketing jobs, sales, purchasing, HR, lawyers – all of these careers that they could do,” said Schutt. “They could work in one of our plants and build one of the RVs.”
As part of the Learn, Engage, Achieve, and Perform (LEAP) Program, Thor has been visiting Elkhart County schools for the past year or so, bringing to light all the opportunities in their home community – a county of Indiana that saw a 4.7 percent gain in employment from March 2017 to March 2018.
“There’s opportunity within our industry to enter with one type of job but work your way up,” he said. “Bob Martin, our CEO and president, he’s a graduate of Elkhart schools. A number of these schools we’re going to he went to as a student.”
LEAP is structured for implementation for the fifth- and eighth-grade level, as well as high schools – key points in childhood education. High schoolers get an opportunity with job shadowing and training, internships, etc. Over time, it acts as an investment into a local workforce Thor and other RV-related entities could draw from, solving a decent chunk of the labor shortage issue still beleaguering Elkhart County.
Over a two-hour period, fifth-graders learn what the RV industry is about through activities like building RVs with Legos, problem-solving competitions and playing trivia games, answering questions such as: “What percentage of RVs are built in Northern Indiana?” (The answer is 80 percent, by the way.) This is followed by tours of different Thor units like the Vegas RV.
“A lot of them have never been inside one before,” Schutt said.
LEAP hopes to reach 5,000 students this year. At this point in the school year, the program has reached 3,800 students; at its launch last year, LEAP engaged with 1,700. Right now, Schutt is considering introducing LEAP to the schools near the Jayco and Heartland plants in Twin Falls and Nampa, Idaho.
“For us, it was a matter of increasing the awareness of who we are as an industry,” he said. “We’re the RV capital of the world, right here in Elkhart County. We wanted to get the word to students.”
Some students weren’t yet aware of what’s in their own backyard, Schutt said, learning about the future prospects of the RV industry and various careers therein. Locally, a lot of areas in or around the county experience what’s called “brain drain,” he said, where students graduate and go someplace else to work.
“We want to make sure that students know that there are plenty of opportunities for them here,” Schutt said.
From the surveys, Schutt’s seen that 94 percent are very satisfied and interested in the RV industry. One of the biggest questions asked after a LEAP session for eighth-graders is: “How likely are you to work in the RV industry one day?” The feedback, he said, has been positive with about 60 percent of students saying they’re very likely to.
From the 700 or so students that replied last year, 66 percent were interested in working in the industry.
