Page 76 - MetalForming Magazine June/July 2022 80th Anniversary Issue

careers by providing full scholarship for tuition and housing for motivated, qualified candidates who get paid to go to class,” notes company’s website. “Our program provides education and hands-on training without the typical financial burdens of going to school. Tuition and fees are completely cov- ered by the program (minimum 3.0 GPA required), housing is provided for students living in Tuscaloosa, stu- dents are paid for their time in class and for on-the-job training, and suc- cessful graduates have the opportunity to become part of the Nucor team with competitive full-time pay and benefits.”
Identifying and Nurturing Talent
To gain a clearer picture of how Nucor has attacked the need to keep its flow of engineering talent strong, we spoke with the firm’s manager of talent acquisition, Marc Brooks. Key to operations at Nucor is a steady stream of metallurgical engineers, “a major that only graduates roughly 300 new engineers annually,” Brooks says. “Beginning around 2010 we launched a campaign to deepen the relationships
we have with several universities, pro- viding funding to them and, in some cases, launching Nucor professorships.”
Those partnerships have led to the development of new curricula. “Nucor, working with the Association for Iron & Steel Technology, has spearheaded the implementation of new courses,” Brooks says. “Industry moves faster than academia. In addition, at several schools we help operate summer bridge programs, where we introduce new students to material science and metallurgical engineering and talk about the opportunities in industry for those majors. We also provide labora- tory equipment and steel samples to enable students to perform tensile tests, conduct corrosion testing and the like. In some cases, they’re even working on real projects to help us study new processing techniques.”
Last but not least are internship pro- grams and job opportunities for those students interested in careers in steel- making upon graduation.
“We focus on eight universities,” Brooks says, “primarily small engi- neering schools (except for Purdue). These schools need resources that we
can help provide. We send our team- mates to these campuses regularly to maintain our presence and work alongside their students. Since 2012 we’ve brought hundreds of teammates on at the undergraduate level through internships, most of which then become full-time employees. Some even have progressed through the company to become general managers at our divisions. Identifying talent early, and nurturing it, is the overrid- ing strategy.”
New Diversity Initiatives
Recently, Nucor has focused efforts on diversifying its talent pool, “again, to ensure that supply exceeds demand when it comes to engineering talent,” Brooks shares.
As such, earlier this year Nucor launched partnerships with three national organizations—the Society of Women in Engineering (SWE), Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). “Early returns on these partnerships are excellent,” Brooks says. “Already we’ve hired interns from all three organizations.
The Nucor Technical Academy provides full scholarships for tuition and housing to qualified candidates who get paid to attend classes.
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