Emily Stover DeRocco Speech
Lehigh Valley Workforce Investment Board
Allentown, PA
December 20, 2005
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For many individuals though, we know that this is not enough. So rather than continue to support or create programs and bureaucratic structures that serve each and every special population, we need a new approach. It is where individuals who face barriers to employment, whether it is disabilities, or language, or personal history, are provided with the flexible resources to help them overcome those barriers. This empowers individuals to serve their own needs and frees the significant resources currently wasted maintaining bureaucratic structures for each and every group facing employment barriers.
For the past 4 years, President Bush and the Labor Department have sought to provide the leadership needed to transform this system.
It started with an effort known as the President's High Growth Job Training Initiative. In this dynamic global environment, the skills required by employees are constantly changing. By partnering with employers and engaging educational institutions, the High Growth Initiative is meant to demonstrate to our system how to keep pace with the changing skill needs; by putting employers in charge of talent development.
Through the process of engaging employers, it became clear that many face the same challenge; they are unable to find the workers they need to fill their available jobs. It isn't that there are not people looking for work, but rather that those people do not possess the skills that are needed in today's workplace.
The best example of this can be found in an industry with which this area is very familiar, manufacturing. The first Friday of each month we learn that manufacturing has dropped several thousand more jobs. Yet at the same time, the Purchasing Managers Index reports that manufacturing activity is expanding and employers are planning to hire additional workers.
That is because manufacturing is in the midst of an historic transformation. Since Henry Ford invented the assembly line, good jobs were available in manufacturing for unskilled labor. But in the last five years, those jobs have been replaced by robots and automated systems. As a result, the jobs that are now available require individuals with the skills to create, program, and repair those automated systems. In effect, jobs in manufacturing are now available only to skilled labor.
Of course, it isn't just manufacturing. The energy industry is also going through transformation as exploration and extraction technology improves. Construction and transportation are also seeing their jobs change rapidly while new industries like biotechnology are growing and hiring.
That is why a cornerstone of the High Growth Job Training Initiative is to engage educational institutions, especially community colleges. Individuals must now learn more specialized skills to work in any industry and they must do so prior to employment because traditional employer-based training programs are a thing of the past.
Pennsylvania has been an active player in the High Growth Initiative with 5 projects found across the Commonwealth focused on the cutting edge industries of biotechnology, geospatial technology, and advanced manufacturing.
The success of the High Growth Initiative was not missed by the President. Recognizing that many of the job opportunities available in the 21st century economy begin with an associate's degree and building on the model of partnerships among educators, employers and the workforce system, the President created a similar but new Initiative called Community-Based Job Training Grants.
These grants are designed to improve the training available at community colleges by connecting employers with the schools to provide more and better teachers, state of the art equipment, and a greater capacity to teach more students. In short, they will improve the ability of our Community Colleges to develop talent.
With these two Initiatives well established, it is now time to move talent development into a central role in the economy. This, of course, cannot be accomplished at the national level.
The U. S. national economy is actually the collection and integration of many regional economies. It is at the regional level where economic development is implemented and where the effects of economic shocks are felt. And it is at the regional level where talent development can help to spur economic growth and provide hope and opportunity to regions that have lost both.
Examples of such areas would be those most affected by global trade, those that have seen their major employer close or leave town as is the case in many defense communities, and those have been hit by a natural disaster.
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