Posted by: For the past year or so, the economic news has been pretty dire all across the country. While we are just starting to see signs of improvement, for state and local governments this is no time to relax and celebrate.
As the economy improves, opportunities to attract new businesses and jobs will begin to present themselves, but only to the regions that have taken the time and made the investment to improve and prepare their workforce.
The emergence of new high-demand industries such as biotechnology and network security will require a different workforce than those currently populating the former manufacturing and industrial regions of our country. For these areas to shake off their high unemployment rates and get their constituents working again in this improving economy, they need to give them the skills, tools and abilities necessary to complete the mission-critical tasks demanded of them in these emerging markets.
In previous posts on Unleash the Monster entitled Get Informed, Get Educated and Get Employed, my associate Lee Ramsayer talked extensively about a concept called the high-performance workforce. The high-performance workforce concept is one in which labor statistics, training and advanced job placement programs and technologies work in unison to help attract new jobs and fill them with highly qualified individuals with unique skill sets necessary for their positions. The regions looking to embrace this concept and prepare their workforce for the jobs of today and tomorrow are the ones that are going to see the new jobs that begin to become available as the economy improves.
That’s what WIRED is all about. WIRED, or Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development, is a program that helps regions prepare their workforces to better compete in the global economy.
One region in particular, Wired65, which includes 26 counties stretching from North Central KY through Southern Indiana, has recently taken an exciting step towards transforming their regional workforce into a high-performance workforce. The region recently signed an agreement with Monster Public Sector & Education (PSE), ERISS, a firm specializing in labor market research and real-time labor demand information, and other organizations to build an empowered coalition of local and national business, education, and entrepreneurial leaders to create a workforce development system to advance talent throughout the region.
Thomas P. Miller and Associates will oversee the resulting initiative and utilize the combined abilities and solutions of PSE and ERISS to create a customizable portal that provides near real-time, actionable insights and analysis on talent supply and demand changes in the region to employers and workforce professionals.
Wired65 will also benefit from several other PSE and ERISS services designed to help advance the area’s workforce. Monster’s FastWeb solution will help local students maximize educational funds and invest them locally by allowing them to search for over $3 billion in scholarship dollars. The Monster Making It Count programs, which I discussed in depth in a previous post, will help orient high school students in the region to meaningful careers, and Power Job Seeker Workshops and Monster Career Fairs will help job seekers find available positions and get hired. The ERISS Learning Exchange will help job seekers looking for training and education providers easily find what they are looking for.
In conjunction with the efforts of other mentoring, educational and management organizations, PSE and ERISS solutions will help to transform the workforce in the Wired65 region into a high-performance workforce.
How is your region preparing its constituents for the impending economic upswing?
Mon, Oct 26, 2009
State & Local