(MARSHALL, Texas) – Three employees of Texas Instruments — equipment engineers Jimmy Carter and Danny Culver and campus recruiting manager Eric Batten — hosted three employer spotlights at Texas State Technical College’s Marshall campus on Thursday, Sept. 14.
An average of 17 students, most of whom were from TSTC’s Automation and Controls Technology program, Process Operations program and Industrial Systems program, attended each spotlight.
Texas Instruments is known primarily for designing and manufacturing semiconductors. The company received an increase in business after the pandemic and the passage of the CHIPS Act, which provides funds for domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S. As a result, Texas Instruments hopes to hire 16,000 new employees across the United States in the next five to seven years.
The company has partnered with TSTC for at least eight years, giving employer spotlights for students and attending job fairs. It has hired TSTC graduates at a starting rate of $24 per hour and sometimes offered sign-on bonuses and relocation assistance.
Batten and Carter both stressed the importance of having employees stay up to date in their machinery knowledge. However, they also made it clear that Texas Instruments offers on-the-job training and said the company’s employees are constantly learning.
“By no way are you going to be expected to know everything on a piece of equipment or on a tool,” Carter told the students. “You will not know it the first day, the fourth month, the fifth year. I’ve been around the business a long time, and I get something new every day.”
Automation and Controls Technology student Alfy Alexander is in the first semester of his journey toward an Associate of Applied Science degree. He was eager to see what Texas Instruments had to offer.
“(The employer spotlights) give the younger generation something to look forward to,” Alexander said.
Representatives from Texas Instruments will return to the Marshall campus on October 3 for an industry job fair.
For more information on TSTC, go to tstc.edu.
