To help meet the industry’s persistent demand for heavy equipment operators, Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers has gone virtual. Facing a bottleneck in getting apprentices ready to operate heavy iron, the union went all in on simulators, and is now running 11 of the Vortex Advantage stations from CM Labs. And according to trainers, results so far have been promising.
“We were able to double the number of members we got through any one class,” says Mark Kara, assistant coordinator for Local 150’s Apprenticeship and Skill Improvement Program. “We’ve been dabbling in simulators since 2009,” he says. “But those had you sitting in an office chair staring at a screen. It didn’t emulate a real machine very well.”