Daley College to add $75 million manufacturing training center

The city plans to build a $75 million training center at Richard J. Daley College to prepare students for jobs in the technology-driven manufacturing field.

Construction on the 105,000-square-foot Daley Center for Excellence on the school’s campus near 76th Street and Pulaski Road in the Ashburn neighborhood is expected to begin next spring and be open to students by August 2017, the mayor’s office announced Sunday.

The training center will replace several temporary structures that have housed the manufacturing program for decades.

The move is part of City Colleges’ College to Careers initiative launched in 2011 with the goal of aligning each of the seven city colleges with an industry poised for growth in the region.

It will be the fourth major capital project under the initiative and is part of $500 million spent to improve Chicago’s seven city colleges under Emanuel’s tenure, according to the news release. The other projects aim to make Olive-Harvey College the city’s hub for education in transportation, distribution and logistics; Truman College, a hub for human and natural sciences; and Malcolm X College, a health sciences campus.

The Daley College center “will open up thousands of opportunities each year for Chicagoans to seize the manufacturing jobs coming to the region,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in the release, which noted that an estimated 14,000 new manufacturing jobs are expected in the Chicago area over the next decade.

The facility will feature state-of-the-art equipment and will also serve as a quality-control testing site for small to mid-sized area manufacturers.