SK Battery America will expand its Georgia workforce by several hundred more employees to meet rising demand. The EV battery supplier exceeded its goal of hiring 2,600 workers for two assembly plants two years ahead of schedule, the Georgia governor’s office announced last week.
The battery maker has spent $2.6 billion on two battery manufacturing facilities in Jackson County, Georgia, since 2019, according to the release. The facilities, which started mass production in early 2022, supply batteries to specific EVs built by Ford and Volkswagen.
Vacant roles at the plants spanned a variety of technical jobs, from production operators to senior engineers focused on manufacturing “highly sophisticated lithium-ion battery cells at scale,” said Stella Kim, a spokesperson for SK Battery America.
Since announcing its first project in Georgia in 2018, the SK On subsidiary has been aggressive in its recruitment and training practices. The battery maker partnered with Georgia Quick Start, a job training program through the state’s technical college system, to train qualified candidates.
“We have met our employment goal ahead of schedule thanks in large part to our partnership with the State of Georgia,” SK Battery America CEO Timothy Jeong said in a statement. “The state’s Quick State program has helped us attract and train workers with a speed and scale that would be difficult for any company to do on its own. More than 300,000 new electric vehicles a year will be on American roads because of the work we’re doing here.”
With SK Battery America now ramping production, it is growing its workforce to match.
In July, the battery maker partnered with the Georgia National Guard’s Work for Warriors Georgia program to hire veterans and other service members. SK Battery America has also collaborated with The Manufacturing Institute, Ford Stewart Heroes MAKE America Logistics Program and the Georgia Dept. of Labor to recruit workers, according to Kim.
She added the starting wage at the plants are $20 per hour, and include various employment insurance benefits and subsidized meals for all shifts.
Georgia’s manufacturing industry saw a drop in its workforce at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, but employment in the sector has been steadily climbing over the past two years, rising from approximately 387,000 workers in January 2021 to 410,000 in November 2022.
“In the midst of a pandemic, we had to take creative approaches to hiring,” Kim said in an email. “We had lots of zoom interviews and even had drive-through job fairs, but we stayed on track.”
