October 4, 2024

Preliminary discussions are under way between East Mississippi Community College’s Workforce Services Division and Huber Engineered Woods to explore training opportunities at the college to provide area residents with the skills needed to work at the company’s state-of-the-art oriented strand board manufacturing plant under construction in Noxubee County.

Huber Engineered Woods LLC (HEW), a subsidiary of J.M. Huber Corporation, is expected to hire more than 150 people once the plant, located on a 551-acre site in Shuqualak, is fully operational. The plant, which represents a $418 million investment by the company, will produce subflooring and wall and roof sheathing used in construction.

HEW operates manufacturing facilities in Maine, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and Oklahoma. HEW-Shuqualak Plant Manager Elden Padgett said rail facilities near the plant site in Noxubee County will provide the company potential for westward expansion.  

“We haven’t built a new plant in 20 years and this facility will probably be our most automated and technically advanced yet,” Padgett said during a recent visit to The Communiversity at EMCC, which houses programs of study that prepare students for careers in advanced manufacturing. “The stranding process, the planing process, loading logs, debarking, pressing the material, almost all of that is automated.”

Padgett said graduates of EMCC’s programs of study that offer training in automation and programmable logic controllers, which can direct a wide range of manufacturing processes, will provide the company with a pool of potential candidates for hire. Those EMCC programs include Systems Based Automation, Mechatronics Technology and Industrial Maintenance.

“We have also been chatting about some of the things we can do to expose EMCC’s team to our manufacturing processes so we can bring some of that (training) back here,” Padgett said.

In addition to the roughly 50 career technical programs offered at The Communiversity, at the Lion Hills Center and at the Golden Triangle and Scooba campuses, EMCC’s Workforce Services Division also offers non-credit training specifically tailored to meet local industries’ needs. That training can include pre-employment instruction or training to provide new skills to a company’s employees.

Representatives from area industries sit on EMCC craft committees that help create curriculum for both credit career technical courses and non-credit workforce courses to ensure that the training offered is relevant. Any training created for HEW-Shuqualak would be done in conjunction with company officials.

EMCC Vice President of Career Technical and Workforce Education Dr. Michael Busby said there will be residents in and around Shuqualak and the surrounding area who will be interested in working at the new plant.

“The question is, ‘How do we best train them?’” Busby said. “Is that training best done at the career technical level or is it through workforce training? It will probably be a combination of both. We want to be able to meet the need for that industry and whatever that looks like, we are willing to go in that direction.”

Padgett said tentative plans call for beginning the hiring process for operator and maintenance positions by the first or second quarter of next year, with hopes to have them trained on plant systems by the end of 2025. Preliminary plans call for production to begin in 2026, with full production possibly ramping up at the end of that year or in early 2027.

“That is a tentative timeline,” Padgett said. “It will take a while to get everyone used to our production processes and trained on the job.”

The area of Oktibbeha, Clay and Lowndes counties collectively known as the Golden Triangle has experienced a manufacturing renaissance in recent years. The area’s success in attracting new industries can be attributed in large part to a business-friendly climate and close working partnerships between the state, educational institutions and agencies such as the Golden Triangle Development LINK, the Mississippi Development Authority, AccelerateMS and the Tennessee Valley Authority, EMCC President Dr. Scott Alsbrooks said.

“We have wonderful partners in the state of Mississippi who are dedicated to economic development efforts to attract new industries, support existing businesses and create educational opportunities for residents to earn good wages in the areas in which they reside,” Alsobrooks said. “We are proud to be a part of that effort.”