Driving our Economy Forward: Aerotek

CHATTANOOGA, TN (WDEF)-Finding the right job can be difficult.  For more than 35 years Aerotek has connected organizations with manufacturing and production professionals.  Tonight, we are learning how the business is helping our community find meaningful careers in this week’s driving our economy forward.

Justus McMillan, Sr. Account Manager says, “We’re a staffing and also services provider for manufacturers in the greater Chattanooga area here locally, to a national North America perspective. We help clients, and contractors find good opportunities but also uh assess business challenges within manufacturing settings. So, we’ve worked with Komatsu, we’ve worked with Volkswagen, we worked with Micronics Engineered Filtration.  We work with a lot of automotive Aztec and Road Tech as well. We work with a lot, over 50 companies in the area. So really thankful for our customers. We look at them as partners. And then also our candidates and contractors cause ultimately, we wouldn’t be who we are without them. Everybody wants a good set of skills or education.  I think that’s where Chattanooga State plays in really nicely. On top of that, good training background, good communication, uh and just reliability.”

Dan Johnson, Account Recruiting Manger says, “Aerotek is an industrial and skill trades focused recruiting firm. So, we partner with folks in our community who are looking for trade jobs like welding, maintenance, Machining, HVAC, and we help them find companies that are hiring in the area. Well, it’s difficult in a couple of different areas for folks that aren’t familiar, with the job market to understand who’s hiring… point in time. They may just not know how to engage with certain companies. They may not know how to find out that the company is hiring. So, we give them access to all the companies that we partner with in one easy uh system to operate within. So, we’re sort of a free agent uh that represents them in the local job market. So, we’ve partnered with Chattanooga State um in in the entire time that I’ve been here with Aerotek which is over 12 years. The partnerships come and go a bit just based off of the students that we’re seeing from them. But we offer um free service again to those students as well, especially to the entry level students who not only may not know about the opportunities that are available in the market. But they may not have any experience in applying for jobs at all.”

McMillan ended by saying, “We’re a nice buffer intermediate. Kind of like a like Dan alluded to, agent for the candidate. We’re a consultant for the client. So, from what’s driving the business, what challenges are you seeing? Where are those gaps at? And then how can we use our services to improve your business. And improve the basically the production and the efficiency of the of the manufacturing. Cause we’re seeing more people retiring, people needing to fill those shoes, you know. How are we going to do that? Well, we’re going to do that through training and education and on the job uh experience. And Chattanooga State helps bridge that gap and build the workforce locally to ultimately improve manufacturing and jobs here in Chattanooga.”