CIRAS projects have a big impact on Iowa and its communities.
Over the last five years, we’ve helped Iowa companies invest, expand sales and avoid costs to the tune of more than $2 billion.
[Read More ...]CIRAS projects have a big impact on Iowa and its communities.
One of the things we do is to help companies find their way around a scarcity of workers. Sometimes, that means helping them reach out to graduating students:
[Read More ...]CIRAS projects have a big impact on Iowa and its communities.
For example, our latest edition of CIRAS News took a look at the breadth of who we’ve helped over the past five years:
[Read More ...]CIRAS projects have a big impact on Iowa and its communities.
For example, our latest edition of CIRAS News took a look at how we’ve affected employment over the past five years:
[Read More ...]Hope you and yours have a joyous holiday season. Here’s a message from our director:
[Read More ...]We make some really cool things in Iowa.
Most of them (like a robotic system from Acieta) aren’t very practical gifts. But when you produce as much as we do here in Iowa, there are tons of great gifts.
[Read More ...]CIRAS’ top two administrators have been honored by the Iowa Association of Business and Industry (ABI) for their work trumpeting Iowa manufacturing.
CIRAS Director Ron Cox and program director Mike O’Donnell, head of CIRAS’ Manufacturing Extension Partnership, jointly received ABI’s Manufacturing Champion Award at a dinner for Iowa business leaders on Tuesday.
[Read More ...]Two Iowa companies over the past year have separately discovered a new way to safeguard vibrating truck fenders and a new, more attractive way to lock patio doors—both as a result of work done by graduating students at Iowa State University.
Capstone students in Iowa State’s College of Engineering worked on the truck fender project for Link Manufacturing, a Sioux Center company that manufactures heavy-duty truck suspensions. The company asked students to extend the life of after-market fender brackets that sometimes were breaking because of vibration.
[Read More ...]Wage levels both reflect and influence the competitiveness of Iowa’s manufacturing sector. The average manufacturing worker in Iowa earned $42,470 in 2015, about 86 percent of the national average. Accounting for Iowa’s lower cost of living improves the picture, boosting the state’s pay on a price parity basis to 95 percent of the U.S. average.
The pay differential* for Iowa’s manufacturing workers varies by the type of work they perform. Iowa’s average production worker, for example, earns 104 percent of the average U.S. production worker’s wage. Iowa‘s engineering-related workers average just 90 cents for every dollar earned by their national peers.
This article demonstrates how closer attention to wage distributions might inform the state’s innovation and workforce attraction/retention efforts. For our example, we classify Iowa and U.S. manufacturing jobs along two dimensions: occupation and inferred skill or experience level. Nine occupational groups are considered, which together account for 95 percent of all manufacturing jobs.
[Read More ...]Interns at ALMACO get much more than an overview of the company’s custom-built agricultural equipment. They become part of the team.
Brian Carr, ALMACO’s vice president of engineering, said student employees at the Nevada-based company get directly involved in completing projects—from initial design, through problem-solving challenges, to the eventual result.
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