ICYMI: Business, Education and Community Leaders Detail Solutions to Address the Skilled Trades Workforce Shortage

On Employers Partnering with Community-Based Organizations to Develop the Next Generation of Tradespeople:

• Dr. Heather Hill, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Central Piedmont Community College: “It starts with groups that bring employers together that identify the gap. And when the employers come to you and say, like a Duke Energy says, ‘We have a gap in lineworkers’ then together you find ways to stand up a lineworker program … We have really challenged our employers through advisory committees, through participation in those different local community groups … and said very specifically, ‘What do you need? What’s the gap? And then how together are we able to create a program to train the workers of tomorrow?’ And the community has been just extraordinary in responding to that.”
• Jim Clark, President & CEO, Boys & Girls Clubs of America: “We cannot solve the skilled trades gap at the point of hiring alone. We have to start earlier — providing young people with credentialing programs that build the skills to pursue careers and connect to real pathways. In Lawrence, Kansas, the Boys & Girls Club is built into a tech high school, sits on a two-year community college tech center, and is part of a powerful local ecosystem, enabling 1,500 teens each year exposure to advanced manufacturing, technology and skilled trades. That’s how we close the gap, turning early investment into a skilled, future-ready workforce.”
• Steve Preston, President & CEO, Goodwill Industries International: “Increasingly, we see national partners who want to have local relevance, which is really where the action happens. … We’re able to bring those partners in and then connect locally in communities important to them. We serve about two million people a year. About 200,000 of those get what we would call job intensive services, which means you have a professional that’s been assigned to you to walk through your journey with you — assess your needs, assess your goals, assess your skill levels, understand where you want to head and then work with you throughout that journey to be successful.”
• Ryan Stowers, Senior Vice President, Stand Together: “We need to fundamentally rethink the way we think about hiring and developing our people. ... Employers can make the biggest change in that formula by changing the demand signal that they send back into the marketplace: that they will not only hire mostly college students, but those without a degree, really looking at the individual. So, when we say, ‘potential over pedigree,’ it means that what we’re suggesting is a new set of tools needs to be built to tell us who people are, to get closer to the individual — a whole human-centric approach to hiring and developing people.”