WEST MIDDLESEX, Pa. – A long-awaited analysis of the skills needed by manufacturers in the five-county Ohio-Pennsylvania region provides “the holy grail” of information for training providers to prepare future manufacturing workers, a regional workforce development official says.

The results of the survey, conducted among manufacturers in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties in Ohio and Mercer and Lawrence counties in Pennsylvania, were released at a forum Thursday where the Mahoning Valley Manufacturers Coalition and the Manufacturing Industry Partnership of Lawrence and Mercer Counties also announced the formation of the Oh-Penn Manufacturing Collaborative.

The partnerships will work collaboratively under the new umbrella to promote their common missions and goals: increasing the manufacturing skilled workforce in the region and creating more seamless manufacturing career pathways. The new brand and the cooperation between the groups recognize the shared labor market in the five-county region.

The announcement formalizes the cooperation between the two groups and lessens confusion to the audience the collaborative is attempting to reach, said Jessica Borza, sector partnership coordinator for the manufacturing collaborative.

A critical component of the joint effort is determining what skills area manufacturers require, an issue addressed by a skills gap analysis conducted by EDSI Inc., Dearborn. Mich., through the Oh-Penn Pathways to Competitiveness project. A total of 72 employers and 11 training providers participated in the survey.

“The idea was to identify in-demand jobs they’re having a hard time filling, what skills they need, and then work with those employers as well as the educational community to align training programs to help fill those skill gaps,” said Ken Mall, EDSI’s managing director of workforce consulting.

Skills-set gaps were found in both the high-tech and low-skill manufacturing jobs, Mall said.

In terms of high-end skills, gaps were found in high-tech manufacturing areas such as machining, electrical maintenance and mechanical maintenance, he noted. As older workers leave the workforce, younger ones are entering in many cases without the required skills, and many training programs have been scaled back or discontinued as manufacturing has declined in the United States.

“What’s happening today is there’s a lot of automation being put into the manufacturing industry. So instead of your typical assembly line worker, you need somebody to maintain the automation,” he said. At the other end of the spectrum. There is a need for workers possessing basic math and reading skills. “You need to be able to turn a fraction into a decimal and vice versa,” Mall said.

The survey also showed that industry credentials should play a role in the overall regional training plan, but the project team didn’t find evidence that the credentials offered or supported by the training providers were organized into defined career pathways.

The skills gap analysis “gives us the very specific information we needed about the skills and competencies our manufacturers need and an ability for us to analyze that against existing programs and curriculum and competencies,” Borza remarked. “For us, it’s the holy grail of what we’ve needed to be able to answer education and training providers’ questions.”

Eric Karmecy, Pathways to Competitiveness project manager, reported progress is being made on credentialing. Reviewing activities during the first year of the workforce innovation fund grant the collaborative received, he told the 170 representatives of manufactures and educational institutions attending Thursday’s event that the project has verified 1,336 credentials achieved by individuals, or 46% of the projected 2,940 credentials. The goals under the grant may change, but “we’re nowhere near where we need to be,” he said.  

Representatives of Ohio’s and Pennsylvania’s workforce development offices praised the collaborative’s efforts .

Dmitry Zhmurkin, director of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry’s Bureau of Workforce Partnership and Operations, said he has been tasked with identifying and fixing the gaps in Pennsylvania’s workforce development system.

“I will go back with a good feeling that there are areas in the state where the right work is being done the right way, he said. "For the state, the task would be to learn from this experience and see how we can expand and replicate it.”

Said Tracy Intihar, executive director of the [Ohio] Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation, "We’re here to help and to support. We have programs. We have revenue. We have dollars that can support the system. We just need to use them better.”

Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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