Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

PCC Selected as Regional Trainer

Photos and Story by James Hill

by James HillPortland Community College has been selected by Raytheon Co., to be one of five training centers on the West Coast to provide hands-on classes to General Motors auto technicians. The partnership was established earlier this year and PCC now trains more technicians than any of the five GM centers in the West.Raytheon sub-contracted with PCC in January 2000 to be the testing center for the company’s Pacific Northwest region, replacing not only the GM Training Center in Tigard, but also satellite centers at Shoreline Community College and College of Southern Idaho. Raytheon is a Lexington, Mass., company that is a global-technology leader, providing products and services in the areas of commercial and defense electronics, engineering and constructing, and business and special mission aircraft. However, it also provides training and curriculum for corporations like GM.The PCC-Raytheon partnership came about because General Motors decided to close many of its local training centers nationwide more than a year ago and create training outlets across the country. To maintain its training and testing presence, GM contracted with Raytheon to provide the curriculum."We wanted to keep a presence in the same area that the former training center was in and the thing that really made it attractive to me was the on-going relationship between PCC and that GM training center,"said Ron Lemke, Raytheon western regional GM training manager.To see how important this training is, just watch GM technicians like Stuart Gimblin and Ed Van Wagner. They take turns climbing up over the exposed engine of the GMC truck in PCC’s automotive shop at the Sylvania Campus. They can’t find what exactly is wrong with the vehicle and inspect each section of the engine.Of course, the problem they search for didn’t come about by accident. It was sabotaged. This wasn’t the work of a terrorist or political group, but Larry Adams, an instructor in PCC’s Automotive Service Technology program. His tampering was for a GM service training class. The two students, Gimblin and Van Wagner, are trying to figure out what’s wrong with the truck, and in the process, get the needed GM training required by their employers. It’s a flurry of activity between the two men, from tilted heads to huddles over the engine to stressful contortions of the face."This can be difficult,"said Van Wagner, an auto technician with John Link Pontiac in Oregon City. "We’ve been at this problem all morning. To solve it we must go through all of the steps to find the problem. There are a lot of variations to what the source of the trouble is."Gimblin, a Chevrolet technician in Redding, Calif., said they must use their experience to weed out options. That means analyzing each part in detail and in a way that only a skilled surgeon could admire."There is a lot of information to learn in a short period of time,"Gimblin said of the testing. "It has several steps to go through like training on the computer via the Internet and other things that we go through before we get to the hands on training. I’ve learned a lot (over the Internet), but there is no substitute for hands on work."Their classmates agree that the PCC location and service is one of the best. Brian Wilson, who is a technician with the Los Angeles-based GM training center, came up to PCC just to be trained by Adams. "I’ve been away from diesel training for 15 years,"he said. "I know Larry’s one of the best in the field and so I came up here."Said Adams, "I try to make sure they understand what we’re doing and they have a good feeling before they leave here. I set a problem in each truck so that it won’t start. Sometimes it can take them awhile because there are different things I do each time. By the end of the day, though, they usually can show me what’s wrong."Lemke said the future of the Raytheon partnership with PCC, "looks very bright."Jeff Triplett, PCC division dean of Business and Industrial Technology, would agree. "It provides a close working relationship with local dealers in the sense we are training their folks and in turn we get a donation of some their vehicles. "This allows us to access more recent modeled cars that are specific to the Raytheon contract. It also gives us recent technology and more state of art equipment that can be used in training."