This story is part of an ongoing series, Powering Change: Panasonic and De Soto. If you'd like to share your excitement or concerns about the electric vehicle battery plant, you can do so here.
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The Panasonic electric vehicle battery plant in De Soto, Kansas, is hiring.
The plant is expected to open this spring and wants to have 1,000 employees hired by summer. Panasonic's overall goal is to reach 4,000 employees.
A company spokesperson gave KSHB 41’s Elyse Schoenig an update on the plant’s latest hiring efforts.
Pay ranges between $20 and $30 an hour. The spokesperson also said Panasonic Energy offers comprehensive benefits and resources to its employees and their families, including, but not limited to, medical, prescription drug coverage, telehealth, vision, dental, mental health, life insurance, legal plan, pet insurance, retirement savings plan and competitive paid time off.
Those interested in applying can learn more about the De Soto plant’s openings through a portal on Panasonic’s website by filtering the location.
A partnership between the incoming plant and Johnson County Community College will train the EV battery plant’s future employees in the community where they’ll bring their work.
JCCC’s Provost and Executive Vice President Dr. Mickey McCloud said the college and plant have developed an apprenticeship training program. The program is unique for many reasons, including it gives both the college and the plant the opportunity to play teacher.
“We're looking at our partners at Panasonic sending us their first cohort of individuals later this spring and that it will be an eight-week training simulation opportunity,” McCloud said. “The instructors for that will be trained by us, teach the courses, but will be Panasonic employees.”
Essentially, the college will train employees the plant has already hired — to teach more employees the plant has already hired — in a hands-on apprenticeship program.
The college even built a brand-new classroom with features specific to working at Panasonic.
“We are training professionals in automated engineering and maintenance mechanics to be teachers, and then we are sharing with them the curriculum that we have built to teach students to do that work, to work with robotics, to work with programmable logic circuits, to understand pneumatics and electronics,” McCloud said.
McCloud said the apprenticeship program is a sign great things are in store for JCCC and the generations the institution hopes to continue to shape.
“The technology isn't just for the end user,” McCloud said of what this program means for today’s world. “It's happening in the factories and in the way that we're building things.”
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KSHB 41 reporter Elyse Schoenig covers the cities of Shawnee and Mission. She also focuses on issues surrounding the cost of health care, saving for retirement and personal debt. Share your story idea with Elyse.