Getting out of Illinois (Davenport, Waterloo: employment, school, universities)

[eeyorelover]

I've been reading threads here and doing google searches on different areas in Iowa. We are relocating from Central Illinois as my husband has been laid off AGAIN due to Caterpillar cut backs! He is a CNC Machinist and it seems that no matter what company he works for, when Cat cuts back, machine shops have to lay off workers!
I am in college so I need something close to a community college. We have loads of family in Central Illinois so we want to stay no more than 3 hours away from them.
It's no easy task finding employment opportunities in this economy especially when you are relocating and also have to figure out housing and school!
Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
xxx
Sandy

[duster1979]

Southeast Iowa is pretty industrial, I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities for CNC machinists. And there are at least a couple of community colleges in this corner of the state, Southeastern Community College in West Burlington and Indian Hills in Ottumwa; both have several satellite campuses as well. Keokuk, Ft. Madison, Burlington, Faifield, and Ottumwa are the main communities in this part of the state that would likely have machinist positions available.

You can search for job listings through Iowa Workforce Development by region here: https://www1.iowajobs.org/jobs/seeke...n=searchRegion
Also all the communities have newspapers with online classified ads if you want to check them out.

If you have any interest in staying in central Illinois, have your husband put in an app at Mechanical Devices in Bloomington. We ship a lot of castings to them and it seems like they are always desparate to hire good people.

Good Luck!

[zz4guy]

Check the quad cities. It's a major manufacturing area that probably has a ton of machinists.

[timeofseasons]

I think the Davenport area may be what your looking for.

[JTJ1977]

Yeah, check out the Quad Cities area. We are much more of an industrial area than most of the state, which seems to be more service and agricultural based. I am not sure about SE Iowa, but you might want to check out Waterloo in NE Iowa, where I resided a few years ago. Its a heavily industrialized town of roughly 70,000 residents, and the metro area has about 150,000 people (kind of small, but not too bad of a place). John Deere is something like a behemoth there (not that its necessarily a bad thing). But we have a large John Deere presence here, with the HQ in Moline, Illinois.

[Dport7674]

The Quad Cities has pretty good community colleges called Scott Community college on the Iowa side and BlackHawk community college on the Il. side. Also a few universities.