Partnerships, good information key to better workforce

The bulk of today’s workforce demands are in skilled trades and highly technical careers. Those who learn these skills and pair them with a good work ethic are assured a well-paying job and an opportunity to climb the ladder. Employers need ever more skilled professionals, but Mississippi is in short supply. Why? We believe a big reason is lack of awareness and negative perceptions. The antidote is good information.

For the sake of their quality of life and local economic growth, raising awareness among both students and adults is a crucial need in workforce development. Today’s economy requires increasingly technical skills to function, but not enough people entering the workforce have these skills. In other words, too many students are being trained in areas where there is little to no demand in the workforce.

The secret sauce to more awareness and better training seems to be in strong public-private partnerships. Recently, Chevron announced it will fund a hands-on STEM project for Jackson County schools. Named the Fab Lab, Chevron’s donation will build a laboratory for students equipped with high-tech gadgets used in manufacturing processes. Jackson County students will get to use their creativity and critical thinking in a way with real applications.

Looking around Mississippi, the best public workforce-training programs have one obvious thing in common: strong ties with private employers. Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College is a shining example. MGCCC’s robust partnerships with Chevron, Mississippi Power Co. and other area industries have resulted in what is among the best industrial training offerings in the state.

However, the problem remains — not enough students across Mississippi are entering the programs that give them the best opportunities. To tackle lack of awareness and negative perceptions, our coalition of employers and other organizations created Get on the Grid (www.getonthegridms.com), a web-based tool aimed at encouraging students to consider in-demand industrial careers such as mechatronics or precision manufacturing.

The goal is to spur more students to enter specific training programs for skills in high demand, where they are needed and can earn higher incomes. Data shows although community college enrollments statewide are slowly rising, enrollments in skilled trade programs are not. Further, because skilled trades are in greater demand, students trained with these skills have a higher chance of getting a job — one that pays more.

To gauge the effectiveness of Get on the Grid, we recently tested several classrooms on the Coast, asking the students questions before and after looking at the website. The test confirmed as students are better informed about good opportunities close to home, many will consider these pathways. The results of this experiment are staggering but not surprising, and this effort is yet another example of a successful public-private partnership between a coalition of employers and the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, Mississippi State University’s National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center and Mississippi Department of Education.

Better communities and stronger households require better jobs, and the majority of the jobs in demand across the U.S. are skilled trades. Both students and adults need to be repetitively exposed to information to make more-informed career-based decisions and ultimately to encourage higher enrollment in technical programs at MGCCC, engineering programs at four-year schools, or even on-the-job training offered by employers. We aim to play a role in that endeavor, but it truly takes a village. Mississippi’s competitiveness depends on it.

This story was originally published May 7, 2017 at 5:10 AM with the headline "Partnerships, good information key to better workforce."