Day 100: Workforce

Day 100:  Workforce:  Last week I attended the International Economic Development Council Annual meeting in Philadelphia.  I always look at the agenda with a careful eye towards any trends.  Workforce issues have always been on the agenda for as long as I can remember.  Skills have also been the main topic.  But it seems that we are moving towards a sever lack of skills in our workforce.  There were a couple of sessions on how to correct that.  When I listened to one of the sessions, I thought it was strange that business is rarely involved in finding a solution.  I can’t figure out if they don’t know what to do, don’t really care, or they never get asked.  I am guessing it is a mixture of all three.  But I mostly think it is the latter.  Yesterday, I talked about following a plan.  The interesting thing I notice about all of these suggested solutions to fix the skills, never seem to include a broad plan.  If you want to truly fix your workforce issues, you need to develop a great overall plan.  The plan should include a task force made up heavily of businesses, and all the support organizations in place.  Then everything from education to workforce recruitment needs to be discussed and planned out.  It is a big issue, but a comprehensive plan, divides the problem up into little pieces.  We helped Dubuque Iowa a few years back and brought all the players to the table.  They came up with fifty activities they wanted to accomplish.  Someone stepped up and took responsibility for each activity and it got done.  Are they still having workforce issues, sure, but not nearly as many if they had never addressed the issue. Next: Rankings

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