Front Range Community College Boulder County campus will play a key role in training optics technicians for companies in Colorado and around the country, thanks to a funding boost this school year from the Department of Defense.
The Longmont campus is expected to get a portion of a $34 million grant from the DOD to help the domestic precision optics industry. The goal is to secure a national supply chain and expand the optics manufacturing workforce in strategic areas of the United States, according to a FRCC news release.
FRCC is one of just six regional schools in the United States that have been selected to train optics technicians. FRCC runs the only optics technology training program in Colorado. The DOD funding will pay for new state-of-the-art equipment for the optics technology classroom and laboratory at its Center for Integrated Manufacturing in Longmont, the news release said.
“The optics industry — both locally and nationally — is in desperate need of skilled workers,” said Amanda Meier, director and lead faculty of the FRCC’s optics program, in the news release. “Right now, we have more employers coming to the program looking for employees than we have students graduating.”
With hundreds of technology and optics-related businesses in northwest metro Denver, the Boulder Valley and northern Colorado, the area is considered a regional hub for the industry. Entry-level salaries in optics usually start at more than $40,000 per year — and increase with experience, often to more than $75,000 a year, according to the news release.
“Optics jobs pay well and are plentiful,” added Meier. “We just need to get more people trained with the high-tech skills required for these technician positions.”
The college seeks to train more people with technical skills for jobs that use precision optics found in many technologies and to “hit the ground running,” the news release said.
The DOD grant will also help FRCC to expand its optics curriculum and allow the school to do additional outreach as the program grows. Meier expects to know more about funding levels by the end of 2021 — but the grant is expected to fund a teaching laboratory at FRCC, as well as instructor training, the news release said.
The American Center for Optics Manufacturing (AmeriCOM) — a consortium composed of industry, academic and government partners — is administering the $34 million grant from the DOD. By 2025, the group aims to bump up the number of trained technicians from less than 50 per year to 800 per year, the news release said.
