The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Employment Training Administration has awarded $3,067,705 in grant funds to Moultrie Technical College to train workers to respond to breakdowns in business systems. The grant will allow for the continuation of the college’s current Remote Automation Management Project (RAMP) for dually-enrolled high school students.

Moultrie Tech will participate in a consortium of college and university partners to develop a Mission Critical Operations program. The consortium grant totals $23,200,362. Partners are four North Carolina-based colleges: Cleveland Community College in Shelby; Nash Community College in Rocky Mount; Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh; and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in Charlotte. The four-year grant will operate through September 2017.

“Mission critical” refers to any factor of a system, such as equipment, processes, procedures and software, whose failure will result in the failure of business operations. The grant will be used to develop a career training pathway to address the demand for a workforce able to anticipate, prevent, mitigate and respond to mission critical breaks. This includes everything from cybersecurity and infrastructure maintenance to communications and emergency operations.

“Moultrie Technical College is proud to participate in this new career training pathway and looks forward to working with our college and industry partners to continue to create opportunities for our local and regional workforce,” said Moultrie Tech’s Acting President Jim Glass.

Glass said MTC’s existing RAMP initiative is a key element in the consortium’s Mission Critical Operations program. The college currently utilizes the RAMP — which delivers interactive, real-time instruction in any discipline — to introduce high school students to the ever-changing world of industrial automation. The students gain both technical college and high school credit toward graduation simultaneously.

Moultrie Tech is the only school in Georgia’s Technical College System with this technology and only the second technical college in the nation to use it as a teaching module. MTC currently teaches students from 14 high schools via the RAMP technology.

The new DOL grant will help MTC continue its quest to help reinvent the region’s economy, said Kelly Daniell, director of economic development at Moultrie Tech. The college received its first $1.75 million DOL grant to begin the RAMP program in 2009.

Daniell noted that the college can continue to implement programs and training needed to reinvent, diversify and better train the local workforce in modern day, mission critical needs. The project will merge two skill sets in the areas of industrial systems, such as electrical or HVAC, and information technology.

She added that there is a need for equipment operators to understand the mission critical operations in the facilities in which they work and to help keep the business running. Programs like MTC’s RAMP serve to provide that necessary training.

Local partners involved with the project include Tifton’s Heatcraft Refrigeration Products, which has a longtime partnership with Moultrie Tech.