Over the summer, Maine Maritime Academy hosted the inaugural Naval Shipyard Institute workforce development training program. The Naval Shipyard Institute, funded by the Navy, is an intensive skills training program taking place on the campuses of Maine Maritime Academy and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard over the course of 14 weeks. During the immersive program, students learn trade skills including structural welding, machining, and marine electrical. Following the successful completion of the program, students are eligible for employment at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard repairing, maintaining, and overhauling nuclear submarines.

The U.S. Navy’s Submarine Industrial Base Directorate expressed the intent to hire approximately 140,000 new employees in the skilled trades over the next 10 years to bolster its workforce to build and sustain the fleet. In an effort to build the capacity of the Submarine Industrial Base, the Navy requested $3.9 billion in federal funding for FY25. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also identified additional funding for the Submarine Industrial Base as the top unfunded priority for FY25.

ORBIS, Inc., a veteran-owned engineering solutions company that provides services for the U.S. Navy and the Department of Defense, managed the Naval Shipyard Institute program in collaboration with the Academy. MMA faculty customized their courses to align with the Navy’s workforce needs. ORBIS’s Naval Shipyard Institute Director Chris Oelschlegel ’05 indicated that “Maine Maritime Academy has the ideal combination of high-quality training facilities and first-rate instructors for the Naval Shipyard Institute program to be successful.”