Home is Where the Jobs Are
Jarraff Industries owner Heidi Boyum is hoping to help support the St. Peter community’s skilled worker shortage by funding manufacturing classes in local high schools and technical colleges in various areas.
After leaving her native St. Peter in the ’90s at her father’s suggestion to “get a taste of the real world” and work for a nonfamily business, Boyum decided that home was where she wanted to be after all. Boyum is now the co-owner and CFO of her family’s business, Jarraff Industries, one of the leading manufacturers of right-of-way maintenance machines, distribution- and transmission-line machines and pipelines. Key products include the Jarraff—a mechanical tree trimmer and the company’s original product— and the Geo-Boy, a brush mower that boasts the most horsepower for its small size in the industry.
Now Boyum wants to help students in and around St. Peter realize the same opportunity: to be able to work in well-paying jobs without leaving the place where they grew up.
In recent years, as tightening budgets in public schools and technical colleges have eliminated manufacturing-related classes such as welding, machining and fabricating, Boyum says, many area manufacturers have been forced to train new workers on the job. “It’s hard to find qualified people,” she says. And it is going to get worse, according to facts from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
Lack of manufacturing classes also makes it difficult to attract students to manufacturing. It is “a trade that people think has gone by the wayside as work has been shipped overseas,” says Boyum. “Manufacturing is such a huge part of Minnesota, and we want to keep that going.”
Working with the St. Peter school district and a number of neighboring manufacturers, Jarraff Industries is in the process of creating a program that will put more manufacturing classes back in school curriculums and technical college offerings. Boyum hopes that classroom exposure to the trades will encourage more students to pursue a career in the local manufacturing industry after high school or college.
“A lot of people come back to their roots after they’ve been gone, or realize college isn’t what they want, or want to do something different. What we’re trying to do here is set them up to come back and hopefully, come back to their community and have a good job that picks up what the needs are for our community,” Boyum says.