'Skills Gap' Leaves Firms Without Worker Pipeline
From Associated Press (July 5, 2011)
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island -- John Russo’s chemical lab has been growing in recent years, even despite a deflated economy, and he expects to add another 15 to 20 positions to his 49 employees over the next year.
But the president of Ultra Scientific Analytical Solutions has
found himself in a vexing spot, struggling to fill openings that
require specialized training in a state where the jobless rate is
close to 11 percent, the third-highest in the nation.
"It’s very difficult to find the right person, and
there’s all walks of life trying to find jobs. I honestly
think there’s a large swath of unemployable," said Russo,
whose firm manufactures and supplies analytical standards. "They
don’t have any skills at all."
He’s talking about the so-called skills gap, a national
problem that has left businesses across the U.S. without a crucial
pipeline of the skilled workers they need in a rapidly changing
economy.
States from Rhode Island to Washington are taking steps to address
the gulf. Michigan launched a "No Worker Left Behind" initiative,
allowing unemployed or low-wage workers to get up to $10,000 in
free tuition for community college study or other training. Several
legislatures passed bills creating "lifelong learning accounts,"
which help workers save for education, training or apprenticeships.
The Aspen Institute is spearheading a national campaign that aims
to do something that hasn’t happened nearly enough: get
community colleges and employers talking.
The need for such efforts, experts say, is enormous.
In a major report in February, Harvard University highlighted what
it called the "forgotten half" of young adults who are unprepared
to enter the work force. Some drop out of high school. Some who
finish can’t afford college. And some who can afford it find
that what they’ve learned in college or vocational programs
doesn’t match employers’ demands.
"Our system for preparing young adults is broken," said William
Symonds, director of the Pathways to Prosperity Project at
Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. "We’re not
saying that the system is failing everybody, but it is leaving a
lot of young people behind."
Educators and business leaders say that a "college for all"
mentality is no longer realistic, if ever it was. Many positions --
known as "middle-skill" jobs -- don’t require a degree from a
four-year institution. The Georgetown Center on Education and the
Workforce estimates there will be 47 million job openings in the
decade ending in 2018. Nearly half will require only an
associate’s degree.
Career and technical education programs, once derided as being for
those who couldn’t cut it academically, offer one path. But
growing those programs has not been a national priority and their
quality is inconsistent at best. Education Secretary Arne Duncan
has called career and technical education the "neglected stepchild"
of education reform.
U.S. Rep. James Langevin, who co-chairs the bipartisan Career and
Technical Education Caucus in Congress, wants to change that. He
has pushed to expand federal funding for such programs so they can
access state-of-the-art technology and equipment. He notes that
Perkins Act funding has remained stagnant over the last decade even
though demand for career and technical education programs has
increased. The funding was cut in the current fiscal year.
The caucus co-chairman, U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson, points to the
story of Tricia Reich, 18, who graduated this month from the
Central Pennsylvania Institute of Science and Technology. The
school trains students in everything from heavy equipment operation
and dental assisting to building construction and landscape
design.
In the automotive technology program, Reich learned everything
there is to know about how a car works. She spent her third and
final year not in the classroom but working at an auto dealership,
at first earning $8 an hour as a service writer. She’s now
employed at another dealership that sells and services Mercedes,
Volvos and Audis, saving money in hopes of attending community
college.
Reich said programs like hers give students "a leg up" once they
get in the real world. "It’s definitely a big plus," she
said.
Rhode Island has been hit harder by the recession than many states,
undergoing a difficult transition from an economy historically made
up of low-tech, low-skill manufacturing and service jobs to a
"knowledge" economy centered on IT, bioscience and health care and
other such fields.
The skills gap is already taking an economic toll. Some businesses
spend tens of thousands of dollars to "skill up" new employees.
Leaving positions unfilled is hardly better. Understaffed firms,
particularly small ones, can’t deliver goods as fast as they
need to or take on new customers.
The problem is likely to become even more acute as the economy
picks up.
"If we don’t address this skills problem, American businesses
will lack the world-class work force needed to compete at a global
level, and many Americans will remain out of work, instead of
accessing the high quality jobs of today and tomorrow," said Penny
Pritzker, a Chicago business executive who is advisory board chair
of the Aspen Institute’s skills gap campaign.
It took Ultra Scientific’s Russo more than half a year to
fill one of those jobs. Until recently, he couldn’t find
anyone to operate a specialized piece of equipment that performs
high-pressure liquid chromatography, a technique that separates
compounds in a solution.
Posted: July 2011
