Cambria’s Adult English Program Breaks Barriers and Opens Doors

LE SUEUR — When Manuel Moreno Pérez started working at Cambria in 2013, he never imagined he’d one day be leading a team of more than a dozen employees. But in 2016, he graduated from the company’s English as a Second Language program, and a year and a half ago, stepped into a supervisor role at the slab manufacturing facility in Le Sueur.

“The biggest change is confidence and being able to communicate in English now,” Pérez said. “Another big change is the opportunities I have access to now that I didn’t before.”

He is one of many employees to come out of Cambria’s ESL program, which has steadily grown since its launch in 2015. What began as a small pilot program aimed at addressing communication barriers has become a cornerstone of the quartz manufacturer’s workforce development strategy.

Founded in 2000, Cambria opened its 165,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Le Sueur with a focus on American-made natural quartz surfaces. Now, with a facility of over a million square feet and just under 2,000 employees, Cambria’s expansion includes a commitment to helping its workforce grow along with it.

CEO Marty Davis said the ESL initiative was born from a simple observation. Non-English-speaking employees, while essential to daily operations, were often stuck in lower-tier roles due to language barriers. Davis, along with Executive Vice President of Operations Brian Scoggin, spearheaded the effort in 2015 to create a program that was not only free, but also held during paid work hours.

“The real motivation was that people were being limited due to their inability to speak English. It’s that simple,” Davis said. “It limited their ability to lead, it limited their ability to learn, and it limited their ability to teach. And those are all things that you have to do to move up in a business.”

Today, the program offers two hours of instruction per week per student, totaling 30 hours of in-person instruction weekly across its Le Sueur slab manufacturing facility and fabrication shop. Additional distance-learning options are available for off-site workers.

Amid the current political climate surrounding immigration and the American workforce, Davis sees first-generation immigrants not only as essential to the company’s growth but also as foundational to the future of American manufacturing.

“First-generation immigration is a critical nuclei, critical fuel to all that is American manufacturing and American enterprise. It always has been,” Davis said.

“The challenge is to get a first-generation immigrant that has the proper fitness, so that we have meritorious people that are aspiring in their lives to grow and be successful.”

With support from local Adult Basic Education, or ABE Consortium, the curriculum has evolved into a comprehensive training platform.

It now includes workplace vocabulary, digital literacy, testing through electronic systems, and exposure to other departments through job-shadowing opportunities.

The program is run by three full-time licensed teachers with formal training in ESL education, a nonnegotiable requirement, Davis said.

Classes are held in a dedicated learning space on-site, equipped with computers and technology that reflect real workplace tools. Students come from a range of backgrounds and Spanish, Taiwanese, Tagalog, and French are among the native languages represented.

Flags line the classroom wall, and a world map displays pins from students’ home countries, a visual reminder that this is more than just a training room, said Bridget Prehn, the ESL Program Manager and Operational Training Manager.

“We push them. You know, if you want to be successful, you have to do other work, interact outside of work,” Prehn said. “We connect them to the library, we connect them to community events, where they are exposed, and they can interact with the language in an authentic way because that’s how they’re going to learn it.”