According to Glenn Johnson, workforce development leader for BASF Corp., the skills and jobs gaps currently impacting the manufacturing and refining industries are merely a symptom of a greater problem.
Glenn Johnson, Workforce Development Leader for BASF NA
"The root cause is interest in manufacturing, and that is solved in career and technical education awareness programs that start as early as grade school -- definitely in middle school -- and are continued in high school, where we then switch gears in getting them into specific job programs," Johnson said.
Johnson added companies must work together in order to "leverage, collaborate and share" resources that encourage young people's interest in technical careers, "because if we don't, the problem will still be here in another 20 years -- a skills shortage of 2 million jobs."
Discussing how best to take a systems approach to workforce development, Johnson insisted that, together, industry partners can create a collective synergy that cannot be gained any other way.
"Once we're speaking with one voice, we can go to Congress and make sure that the Perkins Act is reauthorized," he said, addressing delegates at the Downstream Conference and Exhibition held recently in Galveston, Texas. "We can make sure that workforce development programs and funding are based on job availability and projections."
Providing almost $1.3 billion in federal support for career and technical education programs, the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act aims to increase the quality of technical education within the U.S.
Johnson referred to a study begun in 2000 by the Houston Endowment that tracked all students in Greater Houston public schools beginning with eighth-graders. Following them to ninth grade, high school graduation and then on to college, the study found that only 12,804 out of 64,354 (20 percent) completed a post-secondary credential, whether a training certificate, a two-year or a four-year degree. And the success rate for economically disadvantaged students is only half of that, the study determined.
Recruitment vs. development
Johnson said most organizations focus on workforce recruitment, as opposed to workforce development.
"If you talk to any site leader about their job needs, the first thing they're going to tell you is what they need tomorrow, what their open positions are today and what they expect in the next six months," Johnson said. "That's recruitment, not workforce development. That's a very short-term answer to a problem."
Workforce development, he explained, is talking to eighth-graders at career fairs and job fairs about manufacturing and sparking their interest in the types of jobs that are going to be available to them.
These conversations should then extend to early high school students before they have finished high school, informing them of financial assistance like dual-credit programs that are aligned with job availability projections.
"We know what those jobs are. We need to be sure that when they go to post-secondary education, whether it's contractor training programs, community technical colleges or universities, that they're going toward jobs that we know will be available," Johnson said.
Johnson reiterated the importance of industry partners working together "in synergy" to develop the workforce.
"This is just like the engine in your car," he said. "If you take the alternator out, the engine doesn't work very long. All of these pieces are integral to each other to work.
"We need to draw the volume of people that we need to fill the jobs that we know we have open, get them to our education institutions, and ensure that the learning objectives within those institutions are aligned with knowledge, skills and ability."
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