Help wanted: Thousands needed to build electric vehicles in NC. How to get trained.

Automaker VinFast says it hopes to hire 7,500 people to make electric vehicles at its factory in Chatham County.

To find and train those workers, the company will get lots of help from taxpayers.

VinFast is teaming up with Central Carolina Community College in nearby Sanford to develop assessment and skills programs tailored to the company’s needs. The goal is to not only help the company succeed but also ensure that local residents can take advantage of the jobs it creates.

Community colleges across North Carolina routinely help train workers for local companies, drawing on money provided by the General Assembly. The $1.25 billion in tax breaks and other government incentives VinFast received to locate in Chatham County includes up to $38 million to train its workers.

Central Carolina has worked with companies new to the area, such as Bharat Forge Aluminum and Astellas Pharma, as well as long-standing employers such as Pfizer and Caterpillar, as they change or expand their operations.

“We’ve helped those companies set up training projects to help them make sure that the folks they’re hiring have the skills they need to be successful and do those jobs,” said Margaret Roberton, the college’s vice president for workforce development.

What sets VinFast apart is the huge number of people the Vietnam-based company expects to hire in a short time, Roberton said. It’s more than one community college can handle, so Central Carolina will work with nine other community colleges within a 50-mile radius, helping draw potential workers from an area that stretches from Fayetteville to the Virginia state line.

But the effort will be centered at Central Carolina and its E. Eugene Moore Manufacturing and Biotech Solutions Center in Sanford. The center, still under construction inside a former auto parts plant, will be the largest in the state for training workers for manufacturing and biotech companies. It will include 30,000 square feet dedicated to VinFast, where would-be employees will get hands-on training.

“They’ll have exposure to the kinds of equipment, the kinds of processes and procedures, that would occur at VinFast but within a training environment and be able to go onto the floor and excel much more quickly,” Roberton said.

VinFast isn’t the only company looking for workers

Attracting and training thousands of workers won’t be easy. The unemployment rate in North Carolina was a low 3.3% in June and was even lower in the Triangle, at 3.1% in the Durham and Raleigh metro areas. Chatham County’s unemployment rate of 2.9% was the third lowest in the state.

And VinFast has competition from other new and growing manufacturers. Just up U.S. 421, Toyota has begun hiring the first of 2,100 workers at the battery plant it plans to open in Randolph County in 2025, while Wolfspeed expects to employ 1,800 people at a semiconductor plant now under construction near Siler City.

Executives from all three companies spoke about the challenges of recruiting qualified workers at a forum in Raleigh last winter. They all said North Carolina’s potential to produce and attract a skilled workforce factored into their decisions to locate here. But they also said it will take effort.

Brad Kohn, chief legal officer for Wolfspeed, said its human resources department has what it calls relationship managers who reach out to schools to help cultivate students who might one day work for the company.

“And I don’t just mean four-year universities,” Kohn said. “I mean technical schools. I mean community colleges, and I also mean high schools and sometimes junior highs. Because you’ve got to reach them early and get them thinking about a career in semiconductors.”

Toyota starts even earlier, said Sean Suggs, who is overseeing construction of the battery plant. The company has a program called Driving Possibilities that provides K-12 students with support to keep them on track through school and get them “excited and prepared for the job market.” Suggs said Toyota will bring the program to communities near its North Carolina plant.

“Let’s just call it like it is: 100% of our kids are not going to go to college. They’re not. So why not us?” Suggs said. “So it’s building those building blocks now, and hopefully in the future we’ll have the talented workforce that we need.”

Van Anh Nguyen, CEO of VinFast North America, touted the company’s relationship with the community college system, which it began fostering almost as soon as it announced it was coming to North Carolina.

VinFast has been through this before, Nguyen said.

“Vietnam is not an industrialized country, and over the past five years we have educated and trained a very skilled workforce in Vietnam for doing general assembly, to make a car,” she said. “I’m sure we can do a much better job here.”

Workers encouraged to begin preparing now

It’s Erin Blakeley’s job to set up the VinFast training program at Central Carolina Community College. Blakeley communicates with the company almost daily, often via video conferences with people in Vietnam.

Blakeley says the company is still 18 months away from hiring workers and the training program is still in the early planning phase. She said it will likely include an assessment component, where the community college will see what skills each potential employee already has and what they need to learn before starting work.

VinFast has been easy to work with, Blakeley said, and is leaning on the college’s experience in developing training programs for other companies.

“The cultures are different. The way we do business is different,” she said. “But their leadership is very excited and very eager to adapt to the way we do things here.”

The college is working to develop an advanced manufacturing certificate program that will show students have a basic foundation in working with robots and other sophisticated machinery, whether at VinFast or some other company. Most of those classes already exist.

Even though the VinFast training program isn’t available yet and the factory site is still just dirt, it’s not too soon to begin preparing for a job with the company, Roberton said.

“If you don’t have a background today in manufacturing, but you’re thinking these are going to be really good jobs and this is where I want to be, our recommendation today would be give us a call,” she said. “Let’s get you into a certificate program and get you some of those foundational skills.”

Central Carolina will soon have a website devoted to VinFast. In the meantime, prospective students can contact Blakeley at eblakeley@cccc.edu.