The announcement of a $971,000 grant to a community college’s diesel mechanic program is the first step in the upgrade of Mississippi’s job-training efforts.
Gulf Coast Community College is getting the money to expand its diesel mechanic program from 20 students to 40. According to Mississippi Today, this is because the state needs a lot more mechanics.
Each year from 2017 to 2020, the website reported, an average of 106 people completed diesel technician programs in Mississippi. But the average number of jobs open in that field during those four years was 526. Adding 20 more people to the Gulf Coast program will help — but there’s a long way to go.
Gulf Coast is getting the money from Accelerate Mississippi, the state’s new workforce development agency. Starting in July, the agency took control of a $25 million job training fund, along with other money. The grant for the diesel program is Accelerate Mississippi’s first venture into distributing job-training funds.
As those diesel mechanic job openings indicated, the state needed to rethink what it was doing. Legislation in 2020 gave Accelerate Mississippi more flexibility to distribute job-training funds than the Mississippi Community College Board had when it was in charge of the program.
Ryan Miller, Accelerate Mississippi’s executive director, said the agency is trying to send money and resources to specific areas, including career fields where there are a large number of vacancies for jobs that offer above-average pay. It ought to help that Accelerate Mississippi has a specific task, while job training was one of many things supervised by the Community College Board.
There have got to be other job categories that require specialized training, that pay well, and that have a relatively high number of vacancies around the state. Accelerate Mississippi is right on target in its decision to aim more of its money at these fields.
