Workforce Development Needs Funding, Direction
BOARDMAN, Ohio -- Consistent and clear direction from state and federal governments is among the top concerns – along with unstable and inadequate funding -- voiced by workforce professionals during a roundtable convened this week by The Business Journal.
Aside from funding, the lack of a “clear, concise policy” is the biggest challenge facing workforce development agencies, remarked Bill Turner, administrator at Trumbull County One Stop/Department of Job and Family Services, who was among 10 participants in the discussion. The edited transcript will appear in the MidApril edition of The Business Journal, published April 16.
Over the years and through the "alphabet soup" of programs and workforce agencies, "There were elements of these programs that were all the same but workforce development has become all things to all people," Turner said. “That’s all fine and dandy,” but there needs to be a “clear, concise set policy on what workforce do you want, what do you want out of the workforce development system.”
The executive director of the Mahoning & Columbiana Training Association, Bert Cene, agreed. “If you take funding out of the mix, which is the No. 1 issue, then it has to be direction,” he affirmed. MCTA and the One-Stop system it oversees operates under the Workforce Investment Act, enacted under President Bill Clinton in 1998.
“Obviously since 1998 we’ve been through a lot, but we’ve got antiquated legislation,” Cene said. “We cannot both train for the future and put people to work today -- and satisfy both of those masters -- with the current structure of the WIA legislation. And I have to throw funding into that because you cannot do all of that with lack of funding.”
Annual federal funding for workforce development today is just over $2 billion, down from $3.1 billion three years ago, Cene reported.
“We do need clear-cut direction," Cene reiterated. "What needs to be done is from the national side. Workforce [development] has to be viewed as an economic development driver rather than as social program that nobody really knows whether it works or not,” he said. Without that commitment, “Then it doesn’t matter what we do locally.”
The Oh-Penn Interstate Region, a first-of-its-kind collaboration among agencies in western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio, has found ways to bring about “meaningful change, but now what we need to do is figure out how to embed and sustain some of that change,” said Jessica Borza, coordinator for the Mahoning Valley Manufacturers Coalition and Industry Partners of Lawrence and Mercer Counties. The partners have “rolled up their sleeves trying to figure out how to solve some of these problems. But we have needed to piece together funding,” she added.
Among workforce training providers, one of the challenges is getting an audience with an employer to tell him about available training programs, said Mark Ciccarelli, director of workforce and community outreach at Eastern Gateway Community College. Eastern Gateway has “off the shelf” products as well as the capability of doing customized training. "But when budgets become tighter, one of the first things an organization will cut is workforce development,” he remarked.
Public awareness of the workforce development system and how it operates is another challenge the providers face, said Vicki Thompson, adult education director at Trumbull Career and Technical Center. Such awareness helps state and federal legislators understand “that these things are helping,” she said.
“We know that collaboration really does work” as the manufacturers’ coalition shows, Thompson continued. "They’ve pooled together lots of resources to address the needs of our local economy. Workforce development is an economic development tool. We know the training that’s needed. or the skills gap we're seeing, can be addressed by us working together and we’ve started to do that,” she said.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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