State looks to expand manufacturing training at community colleges

The Illinois Community College System headquarters is pictured in downtown Springfield. (Medill Illinois News Bureau photo by Reece Dower)

CHICAGO — As the U.S. sheds manufacturing jobs, Illinois is accepting applications for $24 million in grant funding to establish training facilities at community colleges aimed at bolstering the state’s manufacturing labor pool.

The funding is for six “manufacturing training academies” at downstate community colleges that will add to two existing academies that opened in 2024.

The new grants will be awarded through a bidding process. The Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity announced that the latest application window opened in January. Community colleges outside of Cook and the collar counties can apply for grants ranging from $3 million to $6 million.

It comes as the industry faces harsh headwinds from a wide range of factors, including those outside of Springfield’s control.

The training academy program is an offshoot of the bipartisan budget and public infrastructure framework that became law during Pritzker’s first year in office in 2019. The Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, a pro-business trade consortium, was instrumental in its launch.

“Today’s manufacturing is far different than it looked 10, 20, 30 years ago,” said Mark Denzler, the president and CEO of IMA. “(For) the states that are going to win on economic development, a large part of that is making sure we have a skilled workforce.”

State funding

The first two training academies were built at Heartland Community College outside Bloomington and Southwestern Illinois College in Belleville. The colleges now offer programs and certificates in a wide range of manufacturing processes and technologies, including robotics, welding, advanced automation and renewable energy technology.

The state also made awards to Richland Community College in Decatur and Kankakee Community College.

“Our skilled workforce is part of what makes Illinois a manufacturing powerhouse,” Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement. “This critical grant funding will empower more Illinoisans to pursue high-demand, well-paying jobs in our growing manufacturing sector.”

The state also awarded more than $17 million last month to fund pre-apprenticeship programs in the state’s building and construction trades. While pre-apprenticeship training is distinct from the manufacturing academies, Pritzker promoted both programs as means to funnel candidates into in-demand jobs with high barriers to entry.

Pre-apprenticeship programs are designed to prepare candidates to enter registered apprenticeship programs, ascension to which is highly competitive in the unionized building trades, said Jay Rowell, executive director at Hire 360, an awardee of the new grant funds.

Other Pritzker administration policies have also sought to bolster manufacturing in Illinois. The 2021 Reimagining Energy and Vehicles in Illinois Act uses tax incentives to attract qualified renewable energy-related manufacturing companies to make capital investments in the state.

The administration’s announcement of the training academy expansion cited a “growing list” of manufacturers that are expanding operations in Illinois, some of which, like Cache Energy and Nano Nuclear, are REV Illinois program participants.

Swimming upstream

The manufacturing sector as a whole continues to shrink across the U.S. Altogether, the U.S. lost 63,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over that same period, Illinois lost 7,100 manufacturing jobs, a pace 2.5 times the national rate. Frank Manzo, an economist at the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, attributed this, in part, to increasing input costs from tariffs and federal cuts to infrastructure funding.

The Illinois Economic Policy Institute is closely tied to several of the state’s labor organizations.

Open interactive graph in a new tab

Manufacturing as a share of U.S. GDP has been on the decline for decades, as have the number of manufacturing jobs in Illinois. Average hourly earnings for manufacturing workers have not kept pace with those in professional and business services, according to BLS data, and the gap continues to widen.

Manufacturing training programs have proven to develop skilled labor pools in the way the policy aims to, Manzo said. But he also argued “by far” the number one way to address any labor shortage is to raise pay and benefits to make the sector more attractive to new candidates who would otherwise not work in it.

“Unions have been hollowed out,” Manzo said. “As a result, job quality at these plants has been hollowed out, and that’s one of the reasons why people don’t want to work in manufacturing.”

Illinois unions have steadily declined over the last 30 years, and manufacturing unions have been especially decimated. Once a leader of the union movement, the Illinois manufacturing sector in 2024 was only 7% unionized, 1% higher than the national average, according to Manzo’s think tank.

In new sources of work like renewable energy and advanced manufacturing, where the training academy program is focused, union density is particularly low according to Professor Robert Bruno, director of labor education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also sits on the Economic Policy Institute’s board.

He added that labor provisions in Illinois’ 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act have made progress to address that challenge.

“The strongest institution for generating higher job quality is to work under a collective bargaining agreement,” Bruno said.

Many of the IMA’s affiliated employers are unionized, but at the same time, their political efforts are sometimes opposed to strengthening organized labor, Bruno said. While not always in agreement on statewide issues, labor organizations and the IMA both support the training academy model.

“The IMA has a long history of working collaboratively with unions across Illinois on a number of vital issues,” Denzler said in response.

Pat Devaney of the Illinois AFL-CIO said the state’s unions and the IMA’s interests are sometimes in conflict, but they regularly work together productively. Both the unions and the manufacturers benefit from a skilled workforce, he said, but jobs must be unionized to be a pathway to the middle class.

Course curriculum

Labor boosters said they were disappointed that nothing in the law or grant agreements requires the community colleges receiving grant funds to teach about unionization.

Heartland Community College, which was awarded nearly $7.5 million in 2021, said the only coursework related to labor organizing or workers’ rights in its state-backed manufacturing programs is a 10-hour OSHA construction safety course.

Paul Carlson, dean of business, technology and human services at Kankakee Community College, which received $12 million in 2024, according to the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity grant tracker, said their curriculum does not cover workers’ rights or labor organizing.

“We do not avoid these topics if brought up in classroom settings,” Carlson said. “They are just not typical of our stakeholders’ needs or students’ interests as they are beginning their lifelong learning and choosing whatever field of endeavor.”

Officials at Southwestern Illinois College and Richland Community College did not respond to multiple requests for comment about their grant-funded workforce development curricula.

Reece Dower is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and is a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.