By Lee Ramsayer and Dan DeMaioNewton

Yesterday we discussed creating effective online career centers to connect and engage Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs), employers, job seekers, and other stakeholders. Today we expand on this idea in our series of steps to developing a high performance workforce.

5. Build Sustained Outreach, Public Relations, and Communications Processes to Drive Pervasive Awareness.

Once a WIB has created an online career center, steps must be taken to ensure it is actually utilized and reaching a sizable and appropriate audience. First, the WIB must create value – making sure that the online experience is valuable for every visitor. Secondly, the Board needs to make sure it HAS visitors. Promoting and advertising programs and services will help drive traffic and in turn create more value. Third, the WIB should utilize other online social networks (like Facebook and Twitter) to create an even broader communications channel. Lastly, the Board should combine online and offline engagement. Monster was able to do this step by asking actual students to help us design and manage the Riverside Youth Career Portal. By making it “by students for students,” we were able to empower local youth while creating an even more valuable site.

How have you promoted your online efforts? Please share your comments below.

To read the full White Paper, Seven Steps to a High Performance Workforce, please click here.

Under a green jobs training grant, NARC, with Monster and ICF Macro, is helping bring unemployed Americans out of poverty into training designed to help them land employment in the energy efficiency and renewable energy industries. Partnering with Monster in cities including Apache Junction, Ariz., Bisbee, Ariz., Midland, Texas, Odessa, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, NARC is working with local partners to assist workers in high poverty communities train for and find jobs in the emerging energy, building performance and materials reuse fields.

Monster’s expertise comes into the final stage of creating a high-performance workforce: getting employed. Through Monster’s Green Jobs Online Career Community, NARC will be able to offer continued encouragement and support to program participants to increase retention, and assist in the placement of participants through tailored online job boards. Monster is building websites tailored for each region that will function not only as a job board, but as a community forum for all things related to finding or training for a green job in each region. Each website includes feature articles on employers hiring into the green jobs industry training or courses; custom industry subgroups per region, such as HVAC, solar, wind; discussion groups and a calendar of events, such as upcoming career fairs;  videos that feature green stories in the region; and an RSS feed of jobs on Monster.com.

Monster Government Solutions has used their unique ability to tap into extensive job and resume data using Real-Time Labor Intelligence (RLI) to discern the total number of green jobs, leading occupations by area and the skills and education each targeted industry is seeking in a candidate to help NARC tailor and strengthen its approach to turning high-poverty areas into skilled workforces.

Do you think a program to train workers for green jobs would help your community?

Even more proactive is El Paso’s youth work program. Last year, the city had 5,000 high school students work for over 400 employers through a summer job program that ran from June to September. Lorenzo’s tactic is to engage young people as soon as possible, and although El Paso has traditionally focused on promoting education and career interests in middle school and high school students, the region is planning to expand outreach to elementary school children if the hopes of fostering enthusiasm for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses. The El Paso WIB also helps high school students identify scholarships and grants available for higher education, and counsel students on the types of course they will need to take to pursue jobs in growing industries. These integrated efforts further Lorenzo’s goal of raising the education level in El Paso in order to produce job seekers with in demand skills.

Unfortunately there are not a large number of jobs available in the area to accommodate all of the newly unemployed.  Monster has partnered with the SWWDB Board to help take a more regional approach.  By looking outside of the immediate community and investigating job opportunities just a short commute away, there has been success in finding more Janesville residents work:

Ed has an optimistic outlook for 2011. Although Michigan has been a victim of several mass manufacturing job layoffs, Ed says that a lot of hiring is happening in his region. Michigan Works is focusing on the hiring need of their state, rather than the unemployment problem, and staying very busy:

In the town of 9,000 people, with 4.5% unemployment (the national average is 9.0%), projected growth numbers estimate that 1,000 new jobs will be created in 2011. Mike faces a major recruiting challenge in drawing people living outside Northwestern Minnesota into the area, even though their burgeoning tech industry offers plentiful jobs and great benefits.

The Workforce Board of Thief River Falls, Minn., has partnered with the local community college, to offer technology training in order to equip job seekers in the area with the skills needed for available jobs, but Mike also has had major success with a recruiting strategy he explains in the video:

Lamar has been combating the high unemployment rate in Macon-Gibb that resulted from major layoffs in the manufacturing sector. Many of these adults do not have the skills or education to be competitive for job openings in other industries, so Lamar and the Macon-Bibb County Workforce Investment Board have been training job seekers in skills that will be attractive to growing industries.

As the NAWB Forum brings private and public sectors together, Lamar expresses hope that the Government and the private sector will continue to build on “a cooperative, collaborative effort to work towards training and educating our workforce.” Take a look at our interview with Lamar and leave your thoughts about his program, or suggestions to help get these people back to work.

We also chatted with Ron Painter, CEO of the NAWB, about what he’s seen and heard from local workforce boards while traveling around the nation and talking to attendees of the conference. Ron noted that the focal point of the conference for the majority of attendees has been discussions of how to harness technology to understand the labor market or different ways to use social media to get the message out about jobs or trainings.

You can watch his video interview on the wide range of challenges, successes and programs that workforce boards across the nation are experiencing, and why he thinks it’s an exciting time to be in the business of getting Americans back to work:

The NAWB Forum not only spread ideas by bringing together people from across the nation to have a conversation, but also through three days of workshops on various topics. Representatives of the Monster Public Sector and Education also participated in three workshop panels, talking about subjects such as reaching out to young people to engage them in the workforce, how to deliver local workshops and trainings that have a big impact, and how to drive development and programs with real-time labor market data.

By embracing a high-performance workforce, local governments and stakeholders can ensure that they have a workforce that can lure companies in growth industries into the region, and keep them there.

Huntsville’s recent embrace of cyber security is an incredible example of a city working towards a high-performance workforce.

With the knowledge that the battlefield of the future is in cyberspace, the city is looking to become a nationally recognized hub of expertise in cyber security, research, development, test and evaluation, engineering, experimentation and life cycle management.

The Mayor recently used the 13th annual Space and Missile Defense Conference at the city’s Von Braun Center as a launching pad for a new initiative that will include the construction of a multi-story “Cyber Systems Innovation and Security Center.” The focus of this center would be securing weapons systems and the technology supporting them against computer attacks.

While the city begins its march towards growing the cyber security industry within its borders, the city’s education institutions are doing their part on the backend to ensure that the workforce is prepared with the skills and knowledge it will need to flourish in the industry.

The University of Alabama in Huntsville has established a new master’s program in cyber security that focuses on protecting information systems from attack. The Master of Science in Information Assurance and Security (MSIAS) is designed to emulate the real world challenges of engineers, managers, and scientists who must work together to resolve their IT security challenges.

Essentially, Huntsville is working to draw in a hot growth industry to the city that will provide jobs while simultaneously training the workforce that this industry will need to thrive. Huntsville is working to create a high-performance workforce in an industry that is not only emerging, but will have a positive economic impact over time. The end result will ensure that the city continues to be an example of economic and population growth even in the country’s ongoing economic downturn.

How could your region benefit from working towards a high-performance workforce?

During his speech (embedded below), Obama took the opportunity to not only deliver a pep-talk, but also to discuss the importance of education on future success. He discussed how, despite the hard times and the strain it is putting on families, it is more important now than ever to achieve academic success to open doors in the future.

He also added that the increasingly competitive global economy is putting pressure on American students to work harder to get ahead.

It’s almost like he’s been reading Unleash the Monster!

We clearly agree. The global economy is making our students work harder than ever. Unfortunately, not all students are like the students at Masterman. Many urban and “high poverty” school districts are struggling to get their students motivated and working toward academic achievement today, and career success in the future.

This is why we created iSucceed, a solution for local schools, regions and economic and workforce development boards designed to get students motivated and looking towards their future. The program also provides the keys for success that many students in “high poverty” regions lack: mentors, soft skills and career exploration opportunities. It’s designed to prepare our students for future careers, and create an American workforce than can compete with the rest of the globe.

If you’re interested in learning more about the iSucceed Program, we’ll be holding a Webinar on September 15, 2010 at 2PM ET to introduce the program and ways that it can help your region. Registration for the Webinar is available HERE.