The Workforce Innovations Network Initiative: Intermediaries Support Regional Economic Development, Building Critical Alliances, and Marketing to Business (3/29/07)

 

Hello and welcome to today’s session:  The Workforce Innovations Network Initiative: Intermediaries Support Regional Economic Development, Building Critical Alliances, and Marketing to Business.  My name is Gary Gonzalez.  I’m going to be handling all technical issues associated with today’s session.  Before we begin I just want to go over the webinar room.  There are going to be three main areas that I’d like to call to your attention, the first being the presentation slide area. It’s where the main content for today’s session will appear and it will be the main focus of your attention throughout today’s session.  The second area is the attendee list at the top left of your screen.  It just displays a list of all of today's attendees. Below that attendee list at the left of the screen is a third area that I’d like to call to your attention, is the chat feature. It allows you to ask questions, make comments throughout our session today. We are going to be using a one-way conference call for the audio portion of today’s session which means that you can hear the presenters, but they can’t hear you. Due to number of attendees and to control background noise and interruptions, we will rely on this chat feature to solicit your questions or comments throughout today’s session. So anyone attending with a group will want to designate a scribe that represents your group by entering questions that occur at any time throughout today’s webinar. Your questions are going to automatically be transmitted to the presenters and will be answered during a Q&A portion of today’s session.

Now if you’d like to submit a question or a comment, all you need to do is mouse over and left-click in the white horizontal text field at the bottom of that chat feature, and then type your message in, and then click the arrow at the right of that text field to submit your question or comment. When you submit a question, your name, the text submitted for your question or comment will appear in red on your screen, indicating that you have successfully submitted that question or comment. I just want to note that all questions or comments are directly transmitted to the presenters, and the other participants will not see your questions or comments.  Please be sure to enter your questions or comments at any time throughout our session today.  We’re going to make time to answer as many of them as possible during the Q&A.

 

And in order to get an idea of who is attending today’s session and to give you a chance to practice using the chat feature, I would like to ask that if you haven’t done so already, that you go ahead and type in your name, the name of your organization, your region, and how many people, if any, are attending with you today. So go ahead and mouse-over, left-click in the white horizontal text field and type that info in and then click the arrow button at the right.  And while everyone is doing that, I’d like to note that today's PowerPoint will be made available for download from the research and information section of the Workforce3 One web space at www.workforce3one.org.

Also, today's session is being recorded, and it will also be made available for viewing within 24 hours after today's session has concluded.  It’ll be posted to the recorded, to the multimedia information section of Workforce3 One and filed under self-paced learning.

3:03 With that I would like to turn things over to today's moderator, Stacey Wagner, the Managing Director of the National Association of Manufacturers in the Ccenter for Workforce Success. Stacy?

Gary, thank you very much. It's a pleasure for me to be here today. I want to thank our presenters, our expert presenters, but I also want to thank the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration for their support of the workforce innovation networks, and the opportunity to tell our audience today how business is taking action to secure skilled workers.

As Gary said, I am Stacy Wagner, and I am the Managing Director of the Center for Workforce Success at the National Association of Manufacturers. Our speakers today are experts from our WIN sites. Mike Smeltzer, who is the CEO of  the Manufacturing Association of South Central Pennsylvania, Eric Parker, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, and Chuck Sturgeon, Senior Director, Education Workforce at the Arlington Chamber of Commerce. Mike, Eric and Chuck will be focusing today on how their employer and employer-led associations and organizations addressed the workforce shortages in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas, by having their organizations act as workforce intermediaries. The particular focus today will be on building alliances with stakeholders and engaging businesses. To that end our webinar today is going to focus not simply on what we know, but how to bring about change because I think we all have an idea in our head about what we should be doing, the hard part is of course actually doing it. And we all know about our critical workforce shortages, and how to solve them by taking on strong private and public partnerships, but we all know it’s the act that brings the potatoes to the meat. So let’s get started on our WINS experience.

Ten years ago a unique alliance was formed by the National Association of Manufacturers, Center for  Success, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for a Competitive Workforce, which at that time was actually called the Center for Workforce Preparation and Jobs for the Future. And we called that unique appliance the workforce innovation network or WINs. Its special feature was its demand driven or business led focus to help align labor market demands with labor market supply. It was initially funded by the Ford Foundation, but by 2002, it was also funded by the Employment and Training Administration and a main partner wins became the public workforce system and that is not to say we hadn't incorporated working with WIBs and One-Stops before that, but we really looked for ways for them to strengthen those partnerships after that.

We were to do the three things listed here, address the workforce issues and gaps, align the workforce development system to meet needs of employers with individuals, and align the needs of empoyers with the needs of individuals. We did that with focus on needs for certain types of skills. We wanted to do that and make more emphasis on how we were working with the workforce investment board and the one-stops, getting business engaged in a way that was meaningful for everyone. We especially wanted to look at how we could build on the skills most needed in those areas and the competencies around that.

So you see a diagram before you. This was really our model. It works, the employer organization intermediaries is the spot between the needs of employers and the expertise of the public workforce system.

The employer organization intermediaries played that special role because they are the trusted voice of business. So rather than having to have the public workforce system, the one-stops, the business representatives at those one-stops, work in a rather retail fashion, the employer intermediaries can aggregate that business voice and represent that back to the workforce system.

This is where first intermediaries functioned in five ways, aggregating need by organizing firms, providing or brokering services for training, conveying skill and competency needs and working on curriculum development, learning more about local economic conditions, and helping to find solutions, and partnering with workforce investment boards to help move everything forward. I do want to make a special point to say we never ever thought of ourselves as a dual system. That we were certainly not trying to replicate the existing public workforce system, but rather, really being a very strong partner, working in a strong partnership so everyone could build on their expertise, and work together without actually duplicating effort.

We had considerable success over time. As I say, we have been working since about 1997 as the workforce innovation networks. We have had a lot of outcomes in that time you can see here and over the next few slides where we impacted over 21 communities and regions, 20,000 and more businesses, placing thousands of workers in jobs, helping business executives to sit on workforce investment boards, putting 563 workers through training, leveraging over 18 million-dollars in regional economic development and workforce development, and also effecting change at the state level as well as the local level by having some of our workforce intermediaries who were in a chamber of commerce also then, working with the South Carolina Department of Commerce to integrate functions across the agency, so we really have had some very local successes, some regional level successes, and also some state level successes, and certainly not the least of which to us was that employers became more satisfied with the services that they were using, initially when we did some information about employers in the public workforce system, many employers did not even know about WIBs and One Stops, so we helped connect them to the public workforce system and then we are pleased to say we think we helped develop those services in a way that everyone could really benefit and become satisfied with that.

We also, as we went along, of course, had to develop some tools for ourselves in order to make the successes happen. You will be able to see these over the next few pages. I’m not going to go into each one in excruciating detail. But they are available to anyone who would like to use them. You can see they are things like reports, partnership agreements, curriculum development, surveys and we're also developing right now five how-to guides, on how employers, and the workforce system can work together, to create career ladders, state initiatives, co-locating businesses and One Stops and working with businesses. We have a lot going on, and it's all available for anyone interested in looking at those. We will talk more about it later on at the end of the presentation.

I want to stop here so our expert presenters can talk about their good work. I also want to say they are going to focus on the things you see on the screen, which are building alliances, and the secret of marketing the concepts of working with employers. But I’m going to ask them to start before I get anybody started, each one of our presenters today is going to will have five questions they are going to be addressing in their presentations. Of course, later on or as you’re listening to the presentations, you can write your questions and send them to us and we will ask those questions when everyone is finished. But the five questions I’m going to ask of our presenters to answer is: 1) How did each organization serve as an intermediary, how did they build their alliances and who were their partners? What tactics did they use to reach business and convince them to be partners? What were the biggest obstacles they faced when building partnerships and trying to get the work done, and then what were the biggest lessons learned. Those are pretty good places to start, and I hope those are some of the questions you had in your mind today. But let me to ahead and get started.

First up is our first WINS presenter, Michael Smeltzer, the President of the Manufacturers Association of South Central Pennsylvania, so let me turn it over and say welcome Mike, and we will turn the microphone over to you.

Thanks Stacey. It's certainly an honor and a pleasure to be with you today to talk about the development of the public workforce system based on the needs of employers in South central Pennsylvania. The Manufacturer's Association is a non-profit trade organization headquartered in York, Pennsylvania. We have offices in Lancaster as well. We were founded in 1906. From the beginning our destiny was to provide services and products to make our employers more profitable and more effective in the local economy. The policies that were set forth by the U.S. Department of Labor, the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, and local workforce investment boards drove us to get much deeper involved in the public workforce system. We took it on as our task to implement the strategy to build a demand driven workforce system, understanding and meeting the needs of job providers.

We initially saw, and I want to reinforce the point Stacey made with regard to working with the public workforce system. You may hear me in my presentation, refer to the One-Stop as a career link, what we call the One-Stop system in Pennsylvania, so I apologize for any confusion. I will try to stay away from that. But we obviously saw the workforce system, wanting to have a balance between the job provider and the job seeker. That was very important to our employers. Employers, obviously we know they dread the bureaucratic nightmare associated with doing business with the government. So as an intermediary they welcomed us to work with them to bridge that gap. We sometimes refer to ourselves as interpreter, interpreting the language of the government, the policies, as well as interpreting the language and the demands of the employers. Sometimes we found we were not speaking the same language.

In the One-Stop system, we found a working culture of work first. That is something we are still working with today, we have had a great amount of progress to transition that, but it's still something we focus on. We also found in the workforce there was significant holes in the pipeline. I will address that a little later.

Stacey suggested we talk about partnerships, and that was very critical to our success in South central Pennsylvania. I could go on and on about who they are, but I will mention just a few. They are the local workforce investment boards, and there are several that we work with, as well as the state workforce board in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. They are the career links offices that are located in the various communities around the South central Pennsylvania region. They are the community colleges and the technical schools that help to provide the training and workforce needs of our local employers. They are the economic development groups that we know are very important to the success of the future of the Pennsylvania economy, and they are the chambers of commerce. I mention those because they had been at the table from day one, and have been very important, but there are many others beyond that, that we have built a relationship with.

The most important aspect, if we believe, of any workforce system, are the outcomes. I will speak for a few minutes about what have we learned through this process.

We found it very essential to build strong relationships because not everything goes as we had planned. There were times during the last few years we have been involved with since 2002, so we have been part of the process a number of years, but there are times when there were very difficult issues we had to deal with. Whenever there's money involved there's typically an opportunity for adversarial positions. As a result of having those strong relationships we were able to work through those issues.

We also had to find some key employers in the community that had great name recognition, also had the passion and the leadership to drive this system. It was not possible, we don't believe, for a nonprofit organization in any community to drive the train. We believe it is essential to have employers who are sitting at the table, day after day, meeting after meeting, trying to deal with some of the issues. It was critical we understood what their needs were. It was also important with regard to the employers that we became very embedded in their organizations. The CEO, the HR person, sometimes they think they know what their training needs are, but we found bringing all levels of the organization, down to the worker, the first-line supervisor, and everything in between, to the table, so we understood what their needs were.

Remaining patient and persistent was very critical as well, there were a number of opportunities when we could have packed our bags and gone home, but we knew the employers were looking for someone to help guide them through this process of developing the future workforce. In that light I will talk to you, that in 2002, when we began the process, certainly in the world of manufacturing, we were laying off a lot more people than we were hiring. So our initiative at the time was to transition employees that were being laid off into other job opportunities. That forced us in a very positive way to work with the other economic sectors in our community. Be it the healthcare system, be it banking community, be it the construction community. That ended up being a great outcome for us, because they remain at the table today and are quality partners for us. As the economy turned in 2004 and 2005, manufacturing began to hire folks again, we had to take on another challenge which we never anticipated, and that was to solve the future workforce. Where today we have programs throughout the high school systems, where we have hundreds of high school students today who are earning credits towards their high school diploma and the expectations of employers, and hopeful those individuals will go on to college, or go on to a technical school, to develop a career, but we now have a foundation of what we refer to as employability skills that our employers are asking us to provide.

The other part of that conversation is the development of the incumbent workforce. I am focusing on manufacturing here because that's been most of our time. In the manufacturing world, the level of technology that we are employing today is well beyond I could have ever imagined 10 years ago. It's forcing us to develop a future workforce, even within our incumbent workforce. That takes on issues of robotics, dealing with high level maintenance programs. We have a tremendous number of programs that deal with advancing the incumbent workers within our workforce today, creating opportunities to bring people outside the world of manufacturing into our factories, and advance them up the career ladder. I guess my final thought with regard to the presentation today is reaching out for help.

There are people, and I have been blessed in learning from so many experts around the country, and I do not consider myself one today. But I have been blessed, and I would encourage each of you to reach out to those of us on this presentation today, and many others, for ideas and looking for opportunities to advance your own programs. Thank you.

Mike, great, that is just wonderful. I’m going to go ahead and summarize and move to the next speaker. But I did want to address one question that came into our chat room from a person who works at a community college. He or she is asking if this is really relevant to his or her thinking. I will say that we do have another webinar, specifically focused on how workforce intermediaries interact and work with community colleges later this month. In April. But I do want to just add that community colleges and technical schools have been a very important part of the partnerships that we are working in around the U.S. What holds true with engaging community based organizations, One-Stops, WIBs, unions, training providers, also includes community colleges. Community colleges are a very important part of the workforce system broadly. In fact, 45% of our nation's post-secondary education students are in community colleges. So this is definitely not an audience we want to minimize in any way, shape or form. It's a very important part of the partnership, whether you are doing a WINS type of initiative, WIRED type of initiative, or any type of regional economic development workforce development initiative. I throw that out there now to our listeners, to say I think it would be helpful to stay on this webinar, and listen, but if you have other things to do today, join us again, please at the end of April, because we will talk specifically about that.

Now let me move back to Mike, and quickly summarize the points I think he made that are really apropos of what we are getting at today. It did seem to me that one of the things that he was focusing on and faced for 10 years, and doesn't seem to be going away no matter how much education, is that employers, sort of like the rest of us, dread bureaucracy. So they are looking for partners who can act as interpreters between the sort of bureaucratic rules and regulations that must be dealt with, and the entrepreneurial mindset of getting things done. So for those organization that can act as those interpreters, and workforce intermediaries, we have focused on it from a very demand driven side, but you know it’s not a new concept in itself. Workforce intermediaries come in all shapes and sizes, and the public workforce system, the WIBs and One-Stops can be intermediaries themselves. So when you think about that, think about how you are going to actually walk the talk, speak the right speak. I think Mike also made a very good point around building partnerships, even those that may fall outside of your original intent or purview. You never know what the future will bring. So if you are focusing on manufacturing to start, but you are facing some larger broader workforce issues in your communities and regions, bring many people to the table. Bring those healthcare providers, bring the construction workers. There are a lot of people out there who can probably benefit if you can scale up your project to sort of cross industry career ladders. If you can do those things you are really in the cat bird seat.

Another thing is about money. I can say this from my personal life, money always brings that sticky feeling about what's going on. When money is involved everybody wants a piece of the action and they want to make sure they get their piece of the pie. So it's really important to be very clear about how you are directing your money, who holds the money, how money is being spent, and to also trust in your partners. This is a very important piece, because at some point you are going to have to trust anyway or nothing will ever get done. So be very clear about your expectations, and learn to trust their partners for what they bring to the table. Also in that vein be very clear about what everyone's needs are, and then be patient and persistent in pursuing those. Then also, keep your eye peeled toward the future. A lot of us are in positions right now, employers especially, and especially manufacturers, where they are looking for workers right now. Certainly we we know from our NAM perspective, that 90% of our manufacturers right now are saying they cannot find qualified production workers. This is an immediate need. But when you look at that in projected terms, there are going to be lots of needs in the future as well. One thing to do is, of course, keep an eye on serving current needs, but also if you can keep an eye toward the future you will be in good standing for sustainability's sake. Those are my quick points that I have taken away from Mike. But let me not stop there because we have two more wonderful speakers coming up. And the second one is Eric Parker, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership. I will turn this over to Eric. Eric, welcome.

27:21 Thank you. And good afternoon to everyone from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I want to thank NAM, the chamber, and Jobs for the Future, as well as Department of Labor for enabling an organization like ours to participate in the network and really learn from the people who are doing great work all around the country.

The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership is a non-profit organization that was founded a decade ago. We're a little unique among the WINS partners, in that we have both business partners and labor partners, we have dedication to family sustaining jobs, and our mission is to help private sector organizations recruit, retain and develop qualified candidates, employees, and to address the employment, low-income issues in the community. We have placed 3000 community residents over the last nine years or so in a variety of fields, but mainly construction and manufacturing, a d have really achieved a high level of performance. Individuals really do reflect the low-income neighborhoods here in Milwaukee, earning on average $9,000 a year, and coming out of their first year on the job with 165% percent increase to around $23,000 a year. We started out in the manufacturing sector at a time when we were coming out the recession in the early 90s, and by the late 90s we were dealing with a growing shortage of qualified workers. We were fortunate to receive support from the NEE Casey Foundations to develop a pilot project to hire, to prepare and, hire central city residents for the manufacturing jobs that were becoming available. There was some modest growth in the actual number of jobs, also a lot of retirement. So manufacturing in our area at that time was really tremendously important to the job market – 20 to 25% of the job vacancies were in manufacturing at the time.

When we got started with the pilot project we had a goal of 10 jobs at over $10 an hour, and 10 employers. So we wanted 100 jobs the first year. What we found was, we had an employer offering jobs at $14, they wanted to hire a hundred people, it ended up taking the partners in the community more than a year to be able to get just two classes graduated. We knew that if the workforce system was going to become the asset for economic growth and development that we knew it could be, we would have to turn things around, and really be able to respond much more quickly to the job opportunities available.

I am sure that the stereotype of the standard service delivery model has changed quite a bit over the years. Back in those days, the obstacles of the topics we are addressing today. The system at at that time was not demand-driven, it was really based on determining eligibility for a particular program, and the funding silos being a second issue. Then evaluating and assessing the candidate, maybe some training, tutoring, some intervention like that. Then job search. The private sector would only come into the picture at that time, if at all. Generally not at the beginning stages, in designing the kinds of programs necessary to meet the demand in real-time. So we do things backwards. That's the -- how do we go about creating partnerships. We saw that what was really necessary to begin with, the actual job opening and work back from there.

So we designed a model that was based on what was going on in manufacturing in the 80s, 90s, moving to the just-in-time system, trying to fulfill orders just as they come in. We were successful in doing that. I think that the ability to work with our private sector partners to develop curriculums at their local community colleges, or other training providers, that was going to make sense for the sector, gave the employers a lot of confidence, and unions, confidence in committing to hiring graduates of the programs.

That became the key to being able to begin to develop the model that would respond to the response of the demand in manufacturing. We then received a competitively awarded demonstration grant from the Department of Labor, at that time, back in 2000, enabled us to begin to replicate this model in a number of other sectors of the economy, and construction, healthcare being the two biggest.

Recently we have established a center of excellence, that for the first time in the community, creates a central clearing house for the assessment, preparation, and placement of a community resident in industries, manufacturing, construction, and related fields. We really bring together this center, if I were to describe what an intermediary is, how we serve as an intermediary, we’re basically bringing jobs and people and dollars and trainers together. That's all we do. The center really has now become a tremendous resource for the workforce development system, and for our community partners, to be able to refer candidates to us, and also for the private sector, manufacturers seeking qualified candidates, and addressing emerging concerns, they have about emergent skill shortage gain, and the largest construction boom in state history.

So in our first two years, we’re about to complete year-end report for last year, we’ve placed 850, you will see on the screen, 750, we’ve been adding to the documentation. We’re up to 850 placements in construction and manufacturing. Those are individuals who went through a tutoring program to prepare for apprenticeships, for one of 37 different classes, welding, carpentry, machining, road building, and many other fields. The training was often delivered by community colleges, also apprenticeship training centers in the building and construction trades.

So the results, we're very proud of the results. But we're also very proud of the impact this is beginning to have. Of see it dramatically in the diversity of apprentices in our area. So a quarter of all new building trades apprentices have been people of color. That represents a 50% increase over previous years. That drove a 31 and a half percent increase in minority apprentices statewide although there was a 4% increase overall. These are really very dramatic results, and for the first time the apprentices are reflective of the demographic composition of our regional labor market. So we are making a great deal of head way, and I think the opportunities are greater in the future as we move forward.

The center is a really significant model right now as we go about changing and improving the way our workforce development system works. We have shown how you bring together public, private, and philanthropic dollars, around a common vision for workforce development. In our case targeting construction and manufacturing. And as elected officials and business leaders, community leaders look to the future, the center is a model for how we can build intermediaries in our community and other targeted sectors of the community as well. I will close with a few lessons.

First, jobs. Jobs were the missing piece. That's what we brought to the table and made us a very strong partner for community colleges and workforce boards and community based organizations.  We were able to bring good jobs to the table, and everyone has a strong interest in making sure we could develop low-income, unemployed, young job seekers to become qualified for those careers, so that we weren’t importing workers for construction projects, and exporting overseas because employers didn’t think that they could find the qualified workers of the future if they made a major investment here in the Milwaukee area.

The second thing was resources. The ability to develop a model that could make that connection between job seekers and family sustaining jobs, put us in the position where all the different elements of the workforce system wanted to work with us as we wanted to work with them. So we have agreements and understandings with all the elements of workforce development. Our colleges, our workforce boards, our -- agencies, the division of rehabilitation, department of corrections, anyone who was working off of a funding stream to help a particular category of individual became an excellent partner. We acted as a financial consolidator, if you will, because we can fill classes with individuals whose funding comes from that whole spectrum of agencies, bringing those resources together, and then subcontracting to our local community colleges, or apprenticeship centers, or other vendors. As a result, being therefore able to leverage private dollars -- profit dollars, and bring that together to attack this growing skill shortage with a much better set of resources and a much better set of partners.

The last thing, jobs resources, the last thing - advocates. We have now in a completely unprecedented way, a strong constituency in the business community, and in the labor movement, that really see the workforce development system as very critical to the future, as a key asset for economic growth and development and prosperity for our communities. So our theory of change, I guess, is that if we can bring key leaders to the table to really advocate for these changes, if we can then begin to impact some public policy issues, coordination issues, and then develop programs that are successful, that these things become mutually reinforcing. Because the more success you have on the ground the more your leaders are there for you, and advocating for workforce development, and the support for the public policy initiatives we know we need to undertake to begin to do things at greater scale is there. I will close on that note.

Eric, thank you so much, That is an absolutely fantastic description of really how you can bring all of the partners together and leverage everyone's strengths, including financing, to really move the community in the direction everyone wants to go. A couple -- I wanted to bring up a couple of points, again, we have questions that are relevant to ask now, so that if people listen to the rest of the webinar, they have an understanding. We did get a question about what is the difference between WIBs and WINS. Actually that’s an incredibly easy question to answer. First of all, I’ll go ahead and take that. The WIBs, of course, are the workforce investment boards, and WINS, is that unique collaboration between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Institute for a Competitive Workforce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Center for Workforce Success, and Jobs for the Future.  So WINS is the Workforce Innovation Networks. WINS, we branded our collaboration so that it would hopefully be easier for people to understand. Two of the largest business associations in the country and the economic development, workforce development think-tank from Boston were working together as a collaboration, one entity with many working parts as the Workforce Innovation Network and WINS. That's the difference between WIBs and WINS.

I want to ask Eric one quick question that came in, it's apropos of what we’ve been discussing. And that is about disabilities. There is a question from the audience, about whether people were incorporated into these programs who were disabled. Eric, did you have that as part of the experience of the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership?

Yes, given the careers that were focused on, obviously there are going to be certain sorts of jobs that won't be a good match for individuals, depending on what their disabilities may be. But we do in fact work and have over the years with the division of vocational rehabilitation and to the extent possible, we find opportunities and certainly have been an important partner for them.

Great. Okay, I am going to move on, in looking at our time, I certainly do not want to short-change in any way the man who is batting clean-up for us today, Mr. Chuck Sturgeon , the Senior Director of Education and Workforce Development at the Arlington Chamber of Commerce in Arlington, Texas.  Chuck, thank you for being with us today.

Thank you, Stacy, for giving me the chance to speak out on what we have been doing in Arlington. I came to this situation in a little bit different way than many of the other participants.  Prior to coming to work here  for the Chamber, I worked for 11 years with our local W IB, both as contractor staff and as board staff. And when the WINS project was beginning, I was actually working at the board and looking at the project from the sight and sounds of what it's like to be approached to be part of this project, and we were excited to be part of that collaboration. Part of that collaboration ended up developing what you see on the screen here now, our Center for Continuing Education and Workforce Development, and this center opened May 7, 2004 on the campus of UT-Arlington, $9.7 million put together from multiple sources, including the city and university and other sources, and had the unique concept of being on a university campus, housing both the continuing education department for the university, and housing the workforce center for the city of Arlington, and really the eastern region of our county.

Last year, as I was happily employed at the WIB, I got a phone call and a recruiting effort came to bring me to work with the Arlington Texas Chamber to do their Education and Workforce Development program here at the Chamber, and when I came over, the exciting thing for me was that instead of being housed at the chamber I was housed at the center for continuing education and workforce development. And so it's interesting to put my life into a place I had some participation in helping to put together.

In our center, you see on the screen a list of many of the different partners that actually house in our center, my office, the chamber offices here, our local independent school district is here, Catholic charities, city of Arlington has representation, Easter Seals, Fort Worth independent school district, Good Will Industries, and interestingly enough, one that always shocks everybody, our local community college, Tarrant County College, has an office here, works out of this building. Texas workforce commission, the Women's Center, UT Arlington Continuing Education Department is here. You keep going on, there's the Employment Services for UT Arlington. Then the local WIB center, Workforce Solutions for Tarrant County maintains their Arlington Workforce Center and a youth opportunity center that specializes in reaching out to these organizations in such a way they are able to help young people who have dropped out of school to get back into school, and also to improve their employment.

46:51 Now, one of the key things we have found here that was very important in this effort that we were making is what we call the trust relationships where we are all partners of our collaboratives, working together for mutual success. We felt this was extremely important to the point that we invited members of different boards of partners to come sit on the chamber board, and actually be chamber board members. And they invited persons from our organization to come sit on their boards. We had such a level of trust we were integrating our groups together at that kind of level.

We would look at various projects that come up, and we would look and decide which partner in the collaborative was best situated to apply for a project. That group will lead out in the effort to procure the funds or things we needed to run the programs. Then we would share openly all those things together for the success of the overall program. A very important point is that we never attempt to use grant funds to create programs that need to be sustained by other means. We use the grant funds to create programs that, because of their merit and their practicality to local businesses and regional businesses would merit their own ability to sustain themselves, and in fact many times we are finding local businesses are more than happy to help sustain the programs when they are able to see bottom line that they are getting the people they need to be economically successful. So the partners working together are able to overcome those kinds of barriers.

We had some obstacles in this process at the beginning because everybody is used to the dollar turf wars or the territorialism, and we had to overcome that. The way we led out at the chamber to do that is we actually shared dollars. When we shared dollars it was just amazing what would happen was people would actually come and want to participate. Go figure, the dollars made some kind of difference. But we started sharing that money and people came. And then as we built collaboratives they start brining their own money and that’s how iit grew and grew and grew.

We are in these efforts attempting to develop, and have projects that are sustainable, that are available for our business partners to use, and that they overcome the barriers that keep us from being regionally competitive. So in doing that effort, the trust relationships continues to build, and we are able to reach out to larger and larger projects as we go along.

The chamber originally, in the WINS program was an intermediary for workforce and economic development, and back in those days I was still working at the WIB, but what we used the chamber for was to make all the contacts with the many, many businesseses they come in contact that our business service staff would never have the opportunity or time to speak with. Think about it a second. Local businesses actually pay many thousands of dollars in some circumstances to the chambers to organize them to be best positioned said for economic success. This means if you are able to work with an organization like the chamber, who is already being paid by those businesses to do this, you bring value to the table, then an amazing thing happens, the connections are made, and wonderful, wonderful opportunities for your job seekers are created. As an example, we had a company come to us who had won a contract from one of our major aerospace manufacturers, and they needed help in locating a piece of ground to build a center on. In developing the training curriculum necessary to train 100 new workers. We were able to work with our local university, our community college, even our independent school district, our workforce investment board, chamber, other partners included, put that together, were able to land that business here in Arlington, and now we are looking forward to those hundred new jobs in the coming months as more people come into the local economy.

Those are the ways it works. The chamber is situated not to be the know-it-all. We don’t think we know it all.  But what we have is the ability to convene groups together, and when we convene people together from the business world, from the workforce development world, from academia. When we bring all these people to the table, amazing things begin to happen that otherwise would never ever happen. We involve ourselves by talking to our state, federal organizations, we are very fortunate here in Arlington to have a mayor and city council that are 100% behind this effort and very helpful. We go to our state capital once a year.  We go to Washington DC at least once a year, and we talk with organizations about what can happen.  We build that kind of collaboration and it becomes a living breathing entity that is an engine that is driving economic growth.

We are creating projects that’ll sustain themselves well beyond any kind of grant period, We are creating projects that increase regional capacity, competitiveness, we are creating systematic change to develop true regional collaboration and increase our region's ability to be globally competitive.

Some of the results of that, for example on your screen, I have pictured the General Motors plant here in Arlington. And their tie with the University of Texas here at Arlington is such that their demand for research, their demand for example the advanced robotics information the university is researching, creates a relationship between them that is mutually beneficial. The result of this is that the business focus is stronger in our workforce development effort, and the necessary support we need for this type of economic development is available. And then we can continue to develop, simulate growth within a given industry.

In this example of the General Motors plant, they are actually working with the school of engineering, and this relationship has been very effective in keeping the General Motors plant here in Arlington, which is one of our major employers, and has been effective, if you see that drawing on the right, that's going to be the new engineering school that will be built on campus, and it’s going to be the largest building on campus. The university is benefiting from this. The sector of manufacturing that General Motors operates in is being benefited by this at many different levels, including suppliers. And research being done on the campus is so strong, has so many commerciable applications such as advanced robotics in our manufacturing firms, that businesses such as General Motors will continue to be involved, because they see direct application or commercialization of the latest technologies in the regional business partnerships.

For example, they are doing research at university on RFID, radio frequency identification technology and General Motors sees wonderful applications for that, all of General Motors’ suppliers see wonderful opportunities. All of these types of opportunities come about from building these kind of collaborations. But it also has a greater regional effect. It’s not only these businesses and these direct partners that have the wonderful opportunity to benefit from all these successes, but in a sense the greater region of North Texas is hugely impacted by this because then we begin to see regional events take place in support of all these other wonderful collaborations, and let me show you a few examples of those if I may.

Recently in Arlington we have developed and are commencing now $100 million in highway improvements, including our I-30 and state highway 360 corridors, and this is all designed to be increasing access to downtown Arlington, to eastern county, to bring traffic into our region to take advantage of the many, many opportunities that are happening in this area.

For the next two to three years we are going to have some traffic problems because there's going to be so many cement trucks, dirt trucks driving around carrying loads to and fro, but in 2009 when most of this work is completed, the whole face of our community will change, and the economic impact is, I think, beyond measure.

For example, we are doing a development near the new Cowboys stadium, that’s going to be called Glory Park, a $600 million mixed use development that’s going to include hotels, shopping, businesses, loft apartments, green belt area, like a riverwalk along Johnson Creek, it’s going to be an incredible development that once again will bring more dollars, more opportunity to our section of the county and really to North Texas. This is just Phase I, Phase II will kick off following 2009 and bring more development. Then everybody probably around the country heard about the new home for the Dallas Cowboys. This stadium is worth over $1 billion, with an estimated regional impact of $7 billion over the next 30 years. You see it pictured there with the lights on. It’s going to be an incredible feature in our community that will bring many different kinds of businesses here.

The bottom line of all that, all the benefits of that participating boils down to greater and greater regional collaboratives. We are looking at things like the Super Bowl coming here, we’re looking at the Cotton Bowl coming here starting in 2010. We’re looking at opportunities to bring many major world class conventions here using the Cowboys stadium facility for that. And each of these opportunities that we have are all coming about because of the collaborations, and the trust relationships we have built with all the partners you saw listed and many others that we don't know the have time to talk about. We are just overly excited probably about the possibilities, but we have businesses inquiring about not only moving here, but even as importantly as that, we have many, many businesses here that are wanting to stay in Arlington, and wanting to grow in Arlington, the county, and North Texas as a region. We will become the center for many of these activities and the model we hope that we can share with everybody, so that in the long run we can become the global leader for economic development that this nation deserves to be. So this is what we are doing here in Arlington, this is where we had success. We don't claim to know it all. We just claim to be able to get people together to dream and then do what needs to be done. Stacey, that's what we are doing here in Arlington.

You know, Chuck, thank you so much. My guess is no one has any questions about what you are doing. It's really very clear that your regional collaborations are having an enormous impact on the central Texas area. So, Chuck, thank you very much.

I will go ahead and wrap up a little bit, we are going to take some questions, but let me put out once again a few points made that you can take home with you regarding how to connect with employers and market to employers and build those alliances.

One, most definitely be plain-spoken and clear on your expectations, and learn to trust. Two, realize that employers dread bureaucracy, belong to business associations to have them act on their behalf, please connect with business associations, it will save you lots of time and headaches. Three, Do your homework on the needs that need to be filled. Don't make assumptions you will have jobs in the area when in fact, you will have a completely different skill need coming up in the near future. If you are looking at efforts to fill right now.

The last point, be very flexible, Rome wasn't built in a day. You are, in fact, no matter how well your roles are divided up, your expectations, your money is divided, moving forward, you are going to find challenges along that path. So you need to be flexible about that.

I am going to go ahead and open this up for questions. We have some interesting questions that have come in. I will divvy them up to the expert presenters. First, I want to go back to Mike's Smeltzer’s presentation. There was a question Mike could answer for us. The question is: With regard to money, could you please comment about how to create sustainability for projects? So, Mike?

Mike: I would phrase with three words: Innovative, aggressive, and persistent. We have been fortunate, our labor and industry department demonstrated significant leadership, provide said grant dollars to enable us to train employees, and make our employers more successful. Looking at the future we understand the need to be self-sustainable, we are looking to employers to participate in the funding. We have never, will never participate in what we would say is free training. We believe that the employer needs to have, a phrase used often, a skin in the game, but that's part of the solution. Also in our communities there are numerous foundations funded by our employers that we have access to, and have been really partners in helping to provide the funding as we move forward. For some of our other workforce programs, we actually charge individuals who want to participate in the programs, access fees to participate in the program, again, hoping to build that sustainable funding issue.

Great, thank you Mike. I have a question also for Eric. The question is: How do you advise addressing immediate employer needs for employers -- immediate employer needs for employees, recognizing that we need systems for long-term. Essentially that would be how can you help fill those jobs in the immediate short-term, also thinking about the long-term?

Yes, what we are mindful of when develop these relatively short-term customized training programs is that the training provider we use is an institution or organization that our participants need to remain connected with on an ongoing basis. So what we specialize in leveraging the dollars to deliver, to subcontract delivery of training to meet employer needs. In the short-term and connecting to other resources, services that help upgrade individuals from there. By using, for example, a community college, as we call them, technical colleges, for the delivery of the training, it gives a opportunity to give credit to lead to diploma or a degree in the future and they can take advantage of employer tuition reimbursement, tuition assistance programs so they can access, if relevant, higher education aid. And if you are working full-time harder to do. At least you are beginning to accumulate some credits that you can then use to complete your schooling in the future. Then in the case of construction, often times it’s an apprenticeship program that is really critical, each trade is different. Some trades have helper or non-apprenticeship classifications people can get into immediately, get some experience, make some contacts, maybe come back to the center for some tutoring, pass that apprenticeship exam, and advance that way. A new partner in the center is also -- consulting, and they work with employers and employees to recruit individuals to enter into construction management fields. That involves mentoring, on the job training, and also we have good programs at our technical colleges and university.

Great Eric, thank you very much. I will ask one more question of Mike. This is definitely within his purview. That is the question that came in: Have any of you looked at differences in your approach when working in a rural area?

I would describe South central Pennsylvania as a combination of urban and rural area. In South central Pennsylvania, which is a nine or 10-county area, we have 1.5 million residents, but there's a lot of geographic area rural. And my answer to that is flexibility. We have employers who are in those rural areas we have had to take the training programs to their workplace. That's where, back to the, you have heard this numerous times in this conversation today – the strong collaborations, the relationships. When there's a need, sometimes the need is unique, we have had to force our community college to implement a welding training program that starts at midnight in a rural part of Pennsylvania. That's, again, back to that partnership, they have understood and are openly participating in satisfying that need. So having that flexibility in the system that allows us to be successful.

Great. Thank you, Mike. Chuck, I have a question, with your great understanding of these relationships, if you could answer this question, please: How have relationships between public and private entities been forged with foundations?

Well, actually the foundations have been very key to that. For example, the Chamber has a foundation, we have the Arlington chamber foundation that actually serves as the repository for some grant funds we have received for various projects like we have discussed. The key relationships, like I said, putting different people from the different organization on the boards of the partnering organization, because then they become truly integrated and involved with each other. And if you are able to do that, you can, if there's an appropriate foundation to approach for funding for an item, it's much easier at that time to do it, because you have the business partner, the local workforce investment group partnering together, make the approach, it’s a unified approach, and many times the approach you can use is much more business-friendly, with the businesses involved, versus if it was just a government entity, because frankly, those two groups speak different languages. So coming together, partnering together, causes some of those difficulties to be less, and allows you to make that kind of approach.

Great, Chuck. Thank you. We have two more questions that I am going to answer, and I’m going to actually combine them because they are part and parcel of the same thing and I’ll just go ahead and answer them. It's really about who can be an intermediary, how you would get something like this going.

While we have approached this most definitely from a demand driven and employer led approach, that is certainly not the only way one can do this. All of the stakeholders in a community who are involved in essentially creating economic growth through workforce development can play that intermediary role. Intermediary simply means that this is an entity that will stand up, be a first among equals necessary a s in a leadership role to drive this common goal forward, trying to create skilled workers to serve the economic goals of the community. You don't need a WINS chamber, or WINS business association, like one of the NAMs allied in your community to play that lead role, although you would want that entity in your partnership. There are many types of partnerships, and I would also recommend for some reading that there's an organization called the Aspen Institute that does a lot of research around intermediaries, also the American Assembly does a lot of research and puts that information around intermediaries – broadly. The key to all of this is really to go to those entities in your community that essentially are the trusted voice of whatever it is that they represent. So your business association represents the business voice. Your public workforce system is there on behalf of individuals who are looking to find jobs and to get the skills they need. Your community colleges represent training providers. Your community based organizations in many cases are reaching down into the community to really work with hard to serve individuals and are a good partner as well. One of the things you will need is someone who can drive this forward in a way that is meaningful, and stay on top of that. And a trusted partner for managing the financial resources of the collaboration.

We think of it in terms, and the reason we started WINS was really because if you want to place people in jobs, go to where the jobs are. That's where the employers come into that. So while we recommend that you go to local business association, like the Arlington chamber of commerce, WRTP, like the Manufacturers Association of South Pennsylvania, those are good organization to start with, and you can find them in your community, but they don't necessarily have to be the lead in that. A public organization can be an intermediary as well as a private organization.

We are going to stop there, I want to just make sure everyone understands that at the end of this presentation on the slides there's contact information for the center for workforce success, the institute for a competitive workforce, and jobs for the future. We are also, can make available if you want to e-mail further questions for the presenters, we can hook you up with Mike Smeltzer, Eric Parker, and Chuck. Sturgeon today. So that’s is not a problem at all. If you have specific questions about how these programs were run, we can make that available to you.

So let me stop there, and turn it back over to Gary Gonzales, and say on behalf of the WINS partnership that we want to thank our presenters for being with us today and taking time from their busy schedules to do so.

Gary: Thank you. I want to speak to everyone a little about Workforce3 One. Workforce3 One is a tool built for you and by you. It encourages peer-to-peer learning among various communities out there. The success of Workforce3 One relies on contributions from people like you. So you can share ideas and innovations, more with others. So we welcome suggestions for documents to share.

So if you would like to submit your content, all need to do is visit the Suggest Content page on the Workforce3 One  web space which is located at the URL featured at the bottom of this slide. As I noted earlier, today's session, the PowerPoint, you can visit the research and information section of Workforce3 One at w ww.workforce3one.org. You will find today’s PPT located there. Also today's session has been recorded and the recording will be posted to the Skill Building section of the Workforce3 One and filed under Self-Paced Learning within 24 hours after today's session has concluded, so before close of business tomorrow.

Now, a little more about Workforce3 One.. As I was saying you can stay connected with trends and innovations, engage in communities of practice, share your ideas and innovations and connect with your peers. You can also learn through live web conferencing events from leaders in industry and government such as today’s.  It’s also a means of registering for news and events as they occur. So we really encourage you to make note of Workforce3 One , as it is a powerful tool funded by ETA and powered by you. Now you can also learning more about the workforce investment system by visiting www.careeronestop.org, or calling 1-877-US2-JOBS.  I will let you know to mark your calendars, the Workforce Innovations Beyond Boundaries Convention in Kansas City held July 17-19 of this year. To learn more, you can visit www.workforceinnovations.org.

 

With that, on behalf of  Workforce3 One, I’d just like to conclude today's session by thanking you all for your time, and we look forward to seeing you on future webinars.

Thank you.