Utah aerospace and defense industry taking a unique recruitment approach
Oct 18, 2024, 6:00 PM
FILE- An Airman from the 388th Fighter Wing’s 421st Aircraft Maintenance unit marshals an F-35A Lightning II during night flying operations at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, March 26, 2019. The Utah aerospace and defense industry is taking a unique recruitment approach. (U.S. Air Force photo by R. Nial Bradshaw)
(U.S. Air Force photo by R. Nial Bradshaw)
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah’s aerospace and defense industry is growing. To help platform this growth, three companies have come together to showcase an artificial intelligence-powered method of career recruitment.
The method is called YouScience Brightpath, and it’s designed to help students realize their aptitude for this specific industry.
YouScience CEO and co-founder Edson Barton said it’s meant to leverage YouScience’s “innovative aptitude-based career guidance tools,” along with the industry expertise of Apogee Worx and 47G‘s community, to create a talent pipeline.
Barton, along with CEO and President of 47G Aaron Starks and co-owner of Apogee Worx, Brian Janroy, joined Inside Sources to discuss their unique recruitment approach.
A growing industry
According to Starks, the aerospace and defense industry accounts for about 20% of the state’s overall economy. It also provides about 300,000 jobs.
Barton said one of the challenges in this industry, however, is getting more people to work in the field.
“I think if we looked around the aerospace and defense industry, here in Utah, we’d probably find another couple of billion dollars that are not being realized because we don’t have enough workers to supply these businesses for growth,” Barton said.
With Brightpath, YouScience is helping identify those individuals at a younger age, Barton said, to help guide them into these kinds of jobs in the future.
Janroy called it a “science-based” approach to identifying talent.
Recruitment
Brightpath recruitment will rely on a series of brain games, Barton said. He described those as simple exercises that help identify people’s natural talents.
“Based on that, we can start to break through self-imposed biases or stereotypes… That are keeping them away from jobs of the future,” he said.
Barton said he often finds a lot of those self-imposed biases in women.
“Women have the skills and the talents to truly do the highest level of work here in Utah and throughout the United States in aerospace, defense and a lot of other industries that they generally just don’t look at,” Barton said. “We’re able to identify that for them, connect the dots for them, and then point them in the right direction.”
The future of the industry
With the advent of artificial intelligence, industries like aerospace are going to see more assessments such as this, to help younger generations understand what they want to do in life earlier on, Starks said.
“Our goal is to move the needle. We’ve got a robust industry. We need to strengthen and develop it,” Starks said. “I think over the next decade, more of the state’s future and certainly economy will be influenced by this industry unlike any others.
And, Starks said he wants to see more people get these higher-paying jobs with more sustainable wages.
“It’s in everyone’s best interest to help students find jobs in this industry,” he said. “And that’s exactly what we’re doing with this partnership.”
