Boeing opens career development center at Heath site

• The Engineering Career Development Center, Boeing's 16th, allows engineers to develop their skills.

NEWARK - Boeing opened an Engineering Career Development Center on Monday at its Boeing Guidance Repair Center in Heath, providing space and technology for its engineers to develop their skills.

John Tracy, the company’s chief technology officer, based at Boeing's headquarters in Chicago, visited the Heath facility to welcome employees to the new center.

"It's the first time I've been here, and I'm very impressed," Tracy told the crowd of at about 70 employees. "You have an incredible safety record here. You really are a role model for every other Boeing site.

"The reason we're here today is the story of aerospace is the story of people. The development center is part of our vision, knowing it's people who define aerospace. It's symbolic of our investment in people and our acknowledgement that people are the most important part of this system."

Boeing employs about 430 people at the Central Ohio Aerospace and Technology Center in Heath, where the core business is repair of the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile guidance systems. The workforce has been stable for about five years, according to Ellen Power, site director.

The U.S. Air Force last year awarded Boeing a $466 million contract for missile guidance repair on the Minuteman III ICBM. The work is expected to be completed in 2021. Boeing's Heath facility also repairs and builds spare parts for aircraft and submarines.

The new center, Boeing's 16th in the nation, provides the engineers with computers, design programs and the Virtual Customer Integration Laboratory. The center not only allows for in-house collaboration, but also sharing knowledge across Boeing locations in the United States.

"I've been looking forward to this," Power said. "It's an opportunity to reach across Boeing and take the best of the best."

Nearly half of the center's employees have technical or engineering degrees, according to Boeing.

Deborah Price, a product engineer with Boeing for one year since leaving UTC Aerospace Systems, said: "Those of us who've been working on this and invested in this are really excited. It gives us an opportunity to focus on developing our careers and our site."

David McCray, a mechanical engineer, said: "I look forward to us being able to teach each other things. It makes work more exciting and interesting to be able to collaborate. Just having the space this size is a huge deal."

Boeing has been in Heath since 1996 when it won the contract for the nation's first privatization-in-place of a military installation, the former Newark Air Force Base.

kmallett@newarkadvocate.com

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Twitter: @kmallett1958