Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, February 6, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group

There’s a clear roadmap out of America’s big job gap — our stumbling recovery from the Great Recession.

And it’s not just about restoking our consumer economy. Rather, it’s about training millions of new skilled workers–as rapidly as we can. And the secret lies in targeted efforts inside our metro regions.

That’s the message of “Closing America’s Job Gap” (W Business Books), a new book whose lead author is Mary Walshok, Dean of University Extension at the University of California-San Diego, and well practiced in the art of regional skill building.

With colleagues Tapan Monroe and Henry DeVries, Walshok suggests we can’t expect that big industrial firms, tied to a slowed-down consumer economy, will pull us out of our prolonged job dearth. Instead, the growth potential lies with small start-up and growth firms. But those firms, heavily focused in knowledge-based activity, are running into a real shortage of qualified workers with technical, engineering, math and science skills.

One reason: skill requirements are rising fast — in 1991 less than half of U.S. jobs required skilled workers, by 2015 more than 75 percent will require special skills.

But there’s an added problem. We we have what Walshok and her co-authors call a “broken education-to-employment system, which is dangerously disconnected from America’s globally respected research leaders.”

I asked Walshok — Why’s the system broken? Her reply: Too little’s don at the regional level, where employers and jobs actually interrelate, to identify the clusters of companies and then match training programs to qualify workers for opening jobs.

Colleges and community colleges, for example, presumably produce graduates who can think, analyze, read manuals. “But they’re turning out people who can’t do anything” — as simple, Walshok suggests, as working with spreadsheets, building a website or describing a complex piece of technology like an iPad application. So targeted post-graduate job training becomes critical.

The demand for science and engineering jobs has been growing by about 5 percent a year, and the country has an estimated 2 million jobs unfilled because of lack of job skills — a situation would be even worse without immigration (now imperiled) of scientists and engineers into the United States.

Some cities and regions are starting to respond. “Chicago Career Tech,” for example, is a new program launched by Mayor Richard M. Daley to take in middle-class workers adrift in the current recession and retrain them for technology careers. It’s a six-month, six-day-a-week program that combines broad career and professional development with hands-on employer-based learning with participating local companies.

The specific fields the Chicago program covers — among them digital media, computer network management, web design and telecommunications — are samples of the broad field that Walshok and her coauthors list as highly relevant for today’s economy.

Other fields they identify range as far afield as marine biodiversity (gauging, analyzing changes in temperature, sea level and ocean chemistry), and health system information technology (the mountainous task of computerizing patient records, including everything from broken arms to heart attacks to lab tests, for instant recall and analysis).

One that struck me: welders. Close to 100 percent of welding school graduates get snapped up by industries spread from aircraft manufacturing and ship building to erecting and repairing bridges — not to mention mass transit and railways along with green industrioes such as building wind energy turbines.

But twice as many welders are retiring as being trained — the U.S. shortage may be as high as 200,000, in a field that pays solid wages. Indeed, the impending retirement of some 25 million baby boomers creates a clear threat of loss of seasoned experienced workers in multiple occupations — but by the same token, massive job opportunity for properly trained replacements.

“Closing America’s Job Gap” ends with Walshok’s rather self-congratulatory — but compelling — account of how San Diego, once a sleepy cul-de-sac at California’s southernmost border, has vaulted past many famed U.S. regions to star in such areas as biotechnology and software. Some 4,000 new tech firms have sprouted there in three decades, with 100,000 new high-wage jobs in life sciences and wireless sectors alone.

The story’s a complex one, involving a new University of California branch and growth of research institutions such as Salk and Scripps. But CONNECT, a civic-scientific coordinating group Walshok helped found in 1985, has been a key catalyst for innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. And it’s never taken its eye off the priority, with local employers, of constant workforce training and “reskilling.”

That doesn’t mean that imaginative universities and colleges, start-up firms and employers, can’t make progress on their own. But the possibilities for success accelerate when a region pulls together, and makes development of a highly qualified workforce a top goal. “Cutting the mustard” for success in the furiously competitive 21st century global economy will likely require no less.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

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