Next week, Volkswagen Chattanooga starts a new two-year apprenticeship training initiative in which students focus on the electric vehicles built in the factory.
The company Thursday graduated 12 students from the Volkswagen Academy Robotronics Program with a concentration on the automation used inside the plant that employs 5,200 people.
“You need to have employees who understand the equipment, and you need employees who are experts about the whole car,” Burkhard Ulrich, Volkswagen Chattanooga’s senior vice president of human resources, said in an interview at the factory.
Those who graduated this week learned how to navigate and work with equipment used to build vehicles, said Steffi Wegener, assistant manager of training and development for VW in Chattanooga.
Starting next week, the academy is training the new group of a dozen apprentices about the EVs the plant assembles.