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Regionalism - The Key to Stronger Employer Engagement: Regional Business Services

PLG Call #2

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Transcript byNoble Transcription Services

Murrieta, CA

TODD COHEN: All right. Welcome everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome to "The Key to Stronger Employer Engagement Regional Business Services." This is a WIOA peer learning group call. So it is a U.S. Department of Labor's Employment & Training Administration call.

My name is Todd Cohen. I'm the director of strategic initiatives at a firm called Maher & Maher. We are a workforce development strategic planning firm and we support ETA in these peer learning group collaboratives. So these are groups formed around some key WIOA topics; really involve individuals like yourselves working together in groups to discuss some of these confidence – share challenges and share some best practices.

This group is around regionalism. So this is the second in a series of calls on this topic. We had one about a month ago; hopefully most of you were on that call. We focused on a region in northeast Florida and really keyed in on the collaboration between workforce and economic development on a regional scale.

Today we are going to continue that kind of discussion going from different directions. We're going to focus on the West Coast this time. And we are going to talk about things like regional business services and involving other partners beyond workforce and economic development; and really get into also a lot of the operational things that go along with forming a regional collaborative. How do you actually put a group together? What does a charter look like? Things like that. I'll say a little more about that in a minute.

Here's how these calls will work. These are discussion calls so your participation in this is absolutely critical. I've done a lot of these calls. The great ones are when you all on the phone start asking questions and sharing your own stories. I think there are folks on the phone that have some good stuff they want to share. So when the time comes, we'll let you know. You'll unmute yourself and really start to fire away some questions at our featured speaker.

So this is not a webinar. It is not like an official presentation. We will present some information out at you. We will stop, not far along into this hour, and we'll just pose – we'll have some questions. I might have a question or two to start it off, but then we really open it up to the group here to really ask whatever you want. It's your time. And then we'll go to the end of the hour and hopefully – I would suspect that there should be a lot of questions. It is a topic that I know a lot of you are trying to figure out and are excited about who we have today.

We brought Andrew McGough. He is the executive director of Portland Metro Workforce Development Board. He is one of the leaders of the Columbia-Willamette Regional Workforce Collaborative. So it's a regional collaborative that cuts across Oregon and Washington – so across state lines. It is several workforce – it's – so is it three, Andrew – three workforce–

ANDREW MCGOUGH: Yeah. Three workforce boards.

MR. COHEN: Three workforce boards coming together, not driven by WIOA, this happened pre-WIOA, but just in response to industry and response to where the labor market really was telling them to go – they realized they need to better align services and programs so started this

Regionalism - The Key to Stronger Employer Engagement: Regional Business Services, PLG Call #2Thursday, July 7, 2016 of 17

off. And because they did this pre-WIOA, we're lucky because we could sort of get, tear into, an example that is already several years down the line.

They've already engaged in some pretty significant planning at that scale and we'll talk about that. They've started to get toward sort of rigid collaborative business services – what that means, instead of approaching business in the unified single voice. They've done vector partnership work. And each board actually specializing in a particular sector, which is really interesting. We'll get into that. And they've come up with some common definitions. They've started to align community college curriculum; I mean a lot of really good stuff.

But they haven't solved everything, and I think Andrew will say that there are some things especially driven by WIOA that they're still trying to figure out. How do you bring some of the other core partners along to the collaborative? How do you –what do you do about performance issues in a regional scale. How do you approach that? I think Andrew is certainly a model but they are still working through some things and I think we can have some great discussion on that.

So I'm going to – I'll turn it over to Andrew. Andrew will go for 15, 20 minutes or so and then we'll come back and we'll tell you how to do – we'll open up your lines and we'll do Q&A. So Andrew let me turn it over to you. Thanks for being here today.

MR. MCGOUGH: All right. Well thank you, Todd. I'm just going to assume everybody can hear me. I've got some allergy issues, so sometimes my voice goes in and out. I apologize. But we are the grass seed growing capital of the world, for those of you who don't know.

So I think I'll start by just giving you the lay of the land and then some historical perspective about why we decided to work as a collaborative. And then maybe some connections to what we've done and where we think we're going with WIOA.

So we're an area of about 8,300 square miles, and so that is about the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. We have a population of about 2.4 million people and a work force of about 1.8 million in the region. About 80 percent of the population is on the Oregon side of the river, so obviously about 20 percent on the Washington side.

We have more than 50,000 businesses in the region and obviously two states, seven counties. And I'll get a little bit more into the counties. But our original intent was to try and align with the metropolitan statistical area, but we don't quite do that. We kind of do most of that. So in reality, our collaborative could add a few more boards and couple more counties, but they would be very small.

We are 98 percent, maybe more, of the population in the MSA, but we don't exactly align with the MSA, which I think is a challenge in some ways, and part of the reason we did this in another. So we have 24 cities within the collaborative, 27 colleges and universities, 28 business chambers, 41 school districts, and 61 economic development organizations.

So my running thing is whenever my economic development partners tell me that we have a complicated environment, I kind of point to the fact that, well we only have three workforce


boards in the region, but you have more than 60 economic development organizations. So needless to say, it's a pretty complicated environment both organizationally, geographically, and population-wise.

So within that 2.4 million people, we have obviously a really hyper-urban center in the city of Portland, which is about 730,000 people now. And we have a ring of suburbs that transcend both states.

So Clark County, to our north is actually located in Washington State. It's a county of about 400,000 people. Washington County, which is to the immediate west of the city of Portland is a county of about half a million people and is really the economic engine of the region – Nike, Intel, Colombia Sportswear, a lot of our larger companies are there.

And then Clackamas County is to sort of our south and east and they're about 350,000. But then we have a county in Washington, Wahkiakum County which is a very small county. It's out toward the ocean. It has, I think, on a good day, 2,500 people, so very, very rural.

Parts of Clackamas County, which is the county to the south of the city of Portland, south and east; includes the Mount Hood national forest. And then north of that in Skamania County, it's probably 98 percent different. Then Ochoco National Forest; that's where Mount Saint Helens is. And it's obviously very rural areas, and those unique issues that go along with those sort of rural and urban issues, as well.

So we started down this path – I kind of looked this up because I wanted to be sure – but it was in 2006 and at the time a good friend of mine was running the workforce development board or workforce investment council, is what they call them in Washington State. But a woman by the name of Lisa Nisenfeld was the director of the Southwest Washington Workforce Development Board. And she and I had worked together in a number of capacities and just sort of were constantly kind of looking for ways that we could work together.

And this individual by the name of Michael Gallus was hired by a regional economic development group to come out and talk about regionalism and how economies function at a regional level. So we contacted Michael Gallus and said, hey, have you ever done any work really sort of primarily focused on labor sheds and how people move within regions? And he said yes indeed, he had done some of that work.

So what we did was hire him to come and have a look at the region and essentially do a presentation – a joint presentation to our respective boards of directors, Lisa's board to the north in Washington State and my board, and really talk about how workers come and go within the region.

So Michael did that. He had some of the coolest graphics I've ever seen and they are proprietary so it's unfortunate but – it costs a lot of money, but he does produce really cool graphics. But indeed, he sort of validated what we knew, which is frankly that businesses don't care about jurisdictional boundaries and frankly neither do workers. Businesses are really interested in how do I find the most qualified people to do the work I need to get done?


And conversely I think, and increasingly, you look at workers and they're willing to travel some pretty good distances to get the best opportunity they can for themselves and their families.

So Michal Gallus did this work. He does these sort of concentric circles. And he showed that if we were to look at commute patterns and look at how companies recruit in the area, the ideal concentric circle would in fact transcend our respective jurisdictional boundaries. And we'd probably be more effective if we figured out how to work together to address that broader region.

And one curious thing that – I mean we all knew, but we never pointed out. One thing that Michal Gallus said was the third largest employer in Clark County, which is again that county in southwest Washington, is Intel. And that's because Intel is located in Washington County on the Oregon side of the boarder. But so many Washington County residents – or Washington State residents come to work every day at Intel that it constitutes their third largest employer.

And actually just to give you a little bit more perspective, about 90,000 people every day cross the bridge between Washington State and Oregon and vice-versa. The vast majority, about 65,000 a day, come into Oregon. But increasingly we are seeing numbers go across the bridge. So we can literally sit and look at the bridges and that gives you some perspective about commute patterns.

I mention that we started and when we started it was just the two boards, my board which covers two counties in Oregon and the city of Portland. And then Lisa, because at the time Clackamas County, which is our neighbor to the south, which is clearly part of our metropolitan area, but at the time they were very reticent to engage in a partnership; in part because I represent the city of Portland. There was a lot of angst there about, well if we join up with those guys, what's that going to mean to our local identity and are we going to get absorbed into their board of directors, and all that kind of stuff. And the leadership in Clackamas County was just not ready at that time for that kind of engagement.

But over the years, they got a new director and that new director had a different vision and also I guess, just a higher level of security. But I mean, those are issues. We are in fact a big dog. If you look at the city of Portland and even my region, we constitute about 68 percent of the total population within the collaborative.

So those issues can come up, but eventually we worked them out with Clackamas County and they joined. And sort of our culminating event, or initiating event was – I don't know how many people on the phone remember WIRED grant. But what we decided to do was to build on the work of Michael Gallus and incorporate that into the second round of WIRED requests. And so we wrote a proposal, essentially to the Department of Labor, under the round two WIRED grant, about building a better regional system. And I think it was a pretty novel approach to the WIRED grant.

Lots of people were doing very industry-specific stuff, but we thought sort of underlying, a lot of the language in the WIRED world was this notion of building a more effective talent-management system. And we saw working together in a more regional level to be responsive to


that. I guess the Department of Labor agreed because they gave us a $5 million WIRED grant. And really that kind of kicked off the work – some of the formal work we started to do as a collaborative.

And I guess I would point out just to say how difficult a lot of this stuff can be. We are called the Columbia-Willamette Regional Workforce Collaborative because frankly people outside of our region don't know what the Columbia-Willamette is. Well those are two rivers that intersect our region. And the reason we are called that is that is because in order to get Clackamas to come to the table, as part of the collaborative, we needed a name that they felt they could relate to. I mean, of course those of us in Portland and Vancouver wanted to call it the Portland-Vancouver Workforce Collaborative, but the folks in Clackamas County couldn't relate to that. And so we came up with the Colombia-Willamette name. Again I think that sort of points out some of the sensitivities and some of the complexities trying to work through some of these relationships.

So after WIRED and as a result of WIRED, we developed sort of multiple areas or buckets of work that we thought made sense to work together on. And those were targeted industry sectors. Then there was of course, how you build a better workforce system – a public workforce system because that's a place where we had some common relationships.

We are fortunate in that the One-Stop system in Washington State is called WorkSource Washington. And the public workforce system in Oregon is called WorkSource Oregon. So having that common brand we saw as being an advantage between the two states. As a result we developed a common business engagement model.

And it was really about how do we organize ourselves to go out and work with industry; to bring them to the table to understand their needs. And then to turn around and make investments, or inform the delivery system about what those needs are, and kind of create that quid pro quo where we're skilling people to the needs of industry. And conversely, once we do that they're providing opportunities for people to get jobs in that industry.

I know Todd was going to share with you a model that we have developed and have been using for a number of years now. It's an industry engagement model and it has sort of a five phased approach that we use for all of our targeted industry work. So we start –

MR. COHEN: Andrew, let me just say – folks that registered for the call should have received that. If you did not though – Morgan are you on the phone? What's the quickest way for folks to get it?

Morgan: Hey Todd. Yes. So there is – there are two attachments included in the outlook invite you received in the last two days. There's also a link to the resources on the event page that you used to register for the call, and that's available on the ION community of practice. So you can get that either from the initial invitation that was sent out, or the outlook invite that should be on your calendar. So it's available in both places.

MR. COHEN: Perfect. Thanks.


MR. MCGOUGH: Yeah. And so if you can't find it there at the end or whatever, if someone wants my e-mail address or if it's available, you can just e-mail me and I'll give it to you. And we basically stole this from some of our economic development partners in the region who had hired a consultant to sort of go out and talk about how do they do recruitment work together. And when I was looking at that I was like, I wonder – we could adapt this for workforce development. And that's essentially what we did.

So it's a five phase approach. It begins with really just how do we work together to A; understand what the targeted industries are and then, identify which of those industries we want to work together on. So we have this evaluation model that's sort of the first phase. We call it the investigate stage.

It's really about deploying a process to really understand what industries we want to work with. And so it contains a number of factors like what's the projected growth over the next decade? What's the total regional employment? Are there existing training programs? Have there been concerns expressed by industry around shortages or gaps or something like that?

And then looking sort of more specifically at economic multiplier effects, and those kinds of things. But anyway, it's really just a structured way to evaluate the industry and evaluate, and help us understand where we can work most effectively together.

Then it moves into putting some work into really inventorying and analyzing local labor market information around that industry; looking at training providers so again, a really sort of structured way to do the analysis.

And then we have a convening phase where we take that analysis actually to the industry and say, hey, this is what our data is telling us about your industry. Is this right? Because again, we are very interested in having industry lead the way. So we saw this as a way – sort of an initial conversation, if you will. It's a good way to bring industry to the table if you're talking about their industry. But also at the same time saying, hey, is this right or not and if it's not right what needs to change or what's different? And then it helps us do a better job on the labor market side to do the analysis, and better understand the industry. So we do that convening.

Then we really – sort of the culminating activity of our industry engagement model is a specific plan. And that plan is really the guiding light, if you will, or the guiding framework that we use collectively, both as individual boards, and then as the collaborative; to work together to address identified industry needs. And these are priorities in that plan, established by industry.

Something that I think is also, something we've learned, but I think is maybe a little unique to us, is we are very, very clear with industry about where our strengths are in terms of a delivery system, in terms of a facilitator, and in terms of an investor; meaning, if we are working with the metals industry, for example, and someone says, our biggest problem is Ph.D.-level metallurgists. That's really not a sweet spot of ours as a public workforce system.


We can make connections for them to universities or colleges in the area that might be able to connect them with those skills or find people who have them. But it's really not an area that we can move the needle on, and we are clear on the front end with industry about that. Now if you want to talk about welders, that's a really good spot for us.

So we try and be as real as possible with the employers about what we can and can't deliver. Because if we don't deliver, our credibility goes out the door faster than we can say, see you. So we really want to make sure that we're not making promises that we can't keep, that industry really understands what our capacities as the system are, in terms of delivery, and where the sweet-spot is for the public workforce system.

And then finally we have this sort of evaluation stage. And really what that does is – it's the mechanism to see, are we actually moving the needle on these industries or not. And so the way that we staff our industry work is – I'll just use manufacturing as an example. And so each board assigns a staff person. So a board staff person is assigned to our shared targeted industries. And so for example, a person on my staff is the lead staff person for the metals manufacturing industry, which is a shared industry that we are all working on together.

But he has colleagues at the other board that he works with on those issues. But it's his job as the lead to coordinate the materials, to bring the folks to the table, to make sure that our ongoing reporting and evaluation work is being done. He is really the driver about convening the staff and making sure we are on the same page and we are moving in the right direction.

If there are grant opportunities that emerge, that leader would take the responsibility for that. So that's the way we deploy board staff. Board staff's job is to convene, understand the needs of industry, to coordinate the development of the data analysis, and the data work, to ultimately develop the plan, and then to do the evaluation work and also to inform the delivery system of what they're hearing from the industry.

So we don't deliver direct services to job seekers, but we do inform the system that does. So it's really trying to create this sort of virtuous loop. So we got guys who are experts in the industry and who are working confidently to understand what those needs are. And then they're turning around once they understand those needs, and then informing the training and the delivery system.

MR. COHEN: Hey Andrew, do you mind if I just, on that point, before we lose it, how does that transition of information actually go? Is it a meeting that your staff has with service deliveries? Is it through like a database of some kind of or –

MR. MCGOUGH: It's all of the above. And again probably an area that we're continuing to work on, so I haven't mentioned that one of the things that – what we think is a big value proposition for this work is to improve the performance of the public workforce system; meaning improve the performance of the system in being responsive to the needs of industry.

So the way we do that is we have a shared industry team that is comprised of staff people from each of the local areas. And these are state staff people often. They could be contractors under


WIOA Title 1B. They could be some college people, but it's really sort of those folks who are primarily responsible for skilling up and then connecting qualified talent to these opportunities.

So we have shared teams of people that are working in the system to do that. And so we convene those folks together. They also are assigned by industry and those assignments align with the industry sectors that we've targeted as a collaborative. So we do it that way.

We also have what we call talent pools which are electronic pools, if you will, just databases of people who have qualifications that align with each industry. So again I'll stick with the manufacturing thing. So we have a pool of job seekers who have validated skills in the manufacturing sector. And all of the boards in our region and then the, sort of the One-Stop delivery system – the local One-Stop delivery system have come to agreement on what skills we are going to validate before people get to go into those pools.

So the idea is to create pools of qualified workers that meet industry-specific requirements, so there's a group of people that industry can pull from when they have these opportunities. So we do that on a regular basis. We convene the business service people at the One-Stops and then we also regularly work with our training provider communities to modify curriculum and – or develop new programs, or interject new certifications into programs, to respond to the industry needs. So its on-going work.

It's a lot of different methods. But the idea is to connect – to substantively connect what we are hearing from business and industry, to the work that goes on in the One-Stop, and the training provider ecosystem, if you will, of the region. But that's ongoing work, because it's tough to do that.

One thing I guess I would point out – we think it is the rule of the workforce development boards to be neutral conveners. So we always start off, sort of, just with board staff and industry people. We do that in part because we want industry to be as honest as possible with us about what does and doesn't work for them, what they need, and how we might help address or solve some of those problems. So we don't want to go to those initial meetings presupposing that the answer is this program or this new curriculum. We want to be as open as possible. And as we listen, and as we hear from industry, that helps us inform who needs to come to the table.

And that's been a little controversial, and I think uncomfortable, for some of our partners, especially on the education side, who are really eager, and want to really make sure that their curriculum is relevant and that it's really – that it's producing the kind of skills that are needed by employers.

But we also know it's not always about going to class. It could be that some incumbent worker needs a different kind of intervention, an off-the-shelf package that's available online, whatever it might be. Or you might want to relook at how you're recruiting. And so again, we just want to start off with a really neutral environment, and encourage employers to be as honest and open as possible about what their issues are, and what they see as potential solution to those. So we try and be open.


I mean, I guess really quickly, because I think I've gone over my time, and it's kind of weird. I don't know if people are sleeping or not. But we also have a charter, which I shared, and that charter is really for – we have a common board committee so each participating workforce board assigns two board members to the collaborative which is viewed as a subcommittee of each of our boards.

So we wanted to make sure that our board members are engaged in this work, and see it as a mechanism to be more responsive to some of the things that they're hearing. And so we created this governing structure where we have a shared board committee. It helps us bring all of the boards together, but it also helps our board members have a role in this and sort of see the bigger picture of working across jurisdictional boundaries.

And I think it's worked fairly well. There's been some fits and starts because some of this stuff is pretty mechanical, once you've made the selection. And we do a lot of work with skills panels. And sometimes our board members have felt a little disconnected from that, just because they may not be members of manufacturing, or healthcare, or whatever it might be.

But overall I think they're very supportive of the concept. They love working together as workforce boards. It helps them connect to a bigger, broader vision and a bigger, broader system. So I think, if nothing else, it's been beneficial in terms of helping board members feel like what they are doing is relevant. And it potentially has a much bigger impact.

So quickly, some other things we do together; we do common research. We just released our second state of the workforce report and that state of the workforce is the state of the regional workforce. We produce sector reports for any common sectors. We do regional sector reports. So we put those out on a regular basis.

And in the workforce system, again I talked a little bit about our talent pools and how do we work together to manage talent. Business and partner relationships; we want to make sure that those connections with business are real and they're efficient for business people. So we've done a lot of work to cut down the number of engagements and to do that together.

And then sort of finally – it's like the way we thought about this originally is sort of the guiding light. If a job order fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of the region, how would we connect the most qualified person to that job order? So that's been sort of our driving light, if you will. Our holy grail is to figure out how we would connect the most qualified person in the region most efficiently and effectively to that opportunity. So with that I guess I could stop and take some questions.

MR. COHEN: That's great, Andrew. Thanks. No way people are sleeping. I can assure you that. That's great stuff. So we are going to open this up.

What you folks do, you press star six, that will unmute yourself and then you can ask a question. I'd ask that you just unmute yourself when you're ready to talk, but keep yourself muted when you're not just to avoid the people with the crazy hold music, or people in the background. So if you do that –so star six.


I would say, get your questions ready. Let me start with one, but soon as this is done, then hopefully folks will chime in. Let me just ask, Andrew, where you're going next? We know [inaudible] came out. Some of these factors certainly tie back into this idea of strong regional partnerships. What are one or two things that you're really keying in on to align that vision, but keep what you have going strong?

MR. MCGOUGH: Yeah. We did do a regional plan as part of the WIOA planning process. So we all hired the same organization to help with our local plans. And then we shared the cost to work with them, to take our local plans and look for common threads and develop a regional – what we would call the first version of a regional plan.

But we're not quite sure what to do with it because the states have prioritized things a little differently, especially around plans. To be honest, our states have been more hyper-local. But we've been contacted by people in DC – they are pretty eager to see what we're going to do, because they know about our region and that.

What I think we're going to try and do is weasel some money out of our states. And I hope no one from the State of Oregon or Washington is on there, but this does take – it takes dedication and focus to make this stuff real, and to make it work. And so we'd really like to see if the states – we're willing to do the regional plan and really do whatever we can to make it – what we're doing now is real. And I think we could argue that in terms of the intent of the regional language under WIOA, we're doing a pretty darn-good job.

But we'd really like to have someone who's kind of focused on the region and making those connections. We still think that the biggest opportunity out there for us is really to continue to evolve the One-Stop system, the regional One-Stop system. Regional with a big R. Because really that, at the end of the day, when we talk to employers, and especially in this economy, it's really what they want from the public system, is qualified people.

And we have to get better at creating a public system that can be responsive to that and can flex given the economy, or the state of the economy at any given time. Four years ago it was all about, oh my god, what do we do with all these unemployed people? And now it's like, what do we do with all these unfilled jobs? And our systems – big systems are still slow to react, to be responsive to that. So that's the area that I think you are going to see us really keying in on, is continuing to evolve the system to make it more responsive to changes in the economy.

MR. COHEN: Great. Thanks Andrew. So who wants to start off? It always takes one person to be brave. Who's got a question?

YOLANDA JOHNSON: My name is Yolanda Johnson and I have a question.

MR. COHEN: Sure. Yolanda, where – could you say where you're from?

MS. JOHNSON: I'm in the Atlanta national processing office, in the Office of Foreign Labor Certification.


MR. COHEN: Okay.

MS. JOHNSON: I wanted to know if the regions communicated with each other. And if they were willing to – for instance, this one region had a position or positions that they were not able to fill, if they could fill them from another region?

Say for instance, many of the employers have positions where they require travel. So if the employer requires travel, he doesn't really mind where the individual is located as the home base. Are the regions acceptable to actually looking for someone suited for the position in a different region to ensure this suitable worker secured one or more of those positions?

MR. MCGOUGH: Yeah. Yolanda, I totally understand your question because a lot of our partners within the One-Stop system, for many years are – the metrics that drive them are placement out of their facility.

And we've really been working hard with the states because in Oregon we have a different department than we have in Washington State. We've been working very hard for a number of years to modify those metrics to basically say it doesn't matter who makes the placement. What really matters is the placement gets made. So it doesn't matter if the best person is in Vancouver, Washington. It's a win for the city of Portland because that person got placed and that business got its needs met. Easier said than done.

But I think with our regional business teams that do – these guys – they're convened again, by the workforce board staff. But we convene these regional business service teams who are the folks in the One-Stop service system. We convene them at least weekly to talk about where we are on with our targeted industry, specifically, and really looking at who's in the pipeline, who's in training, and where they are, within the region.

But breaking down those old metrics around, well, it's really about posting my job and then filling that job with a local person. It doesn't work in a regional environment. The Holy Grail here is, again, to connect the most qualified people with those job openings, regardless of where those people live. As long as they are willing to commute within the region, that works for us. And so it's got to be a win. The idea is to create a win for the whole system when someone gets placed. And I think we are on the path to doing that. We still have bumps along the way, but I think we are headed in that direction.

MR. COHEN: All right.

MS. JOHNSON: Thank you, very much.

MR. COHEN: That's what you're saying. Who else? Star six.

ALEJANDRA SINECIO: Hi. This is Alejandra Sinecio from Heartland Workforce Solutions in Nebraska. And I was just – I may have missed it because I came on a little late, but who kind of led this effort, and began the effort? And how did you involve your chambers in the beginning?


MR. MCGOUGH: Well the workforce boards led it initially. It was myself and my partner up in southwest Washington, and then ultimately our partner to the south. We led it and we led with workforce. We were not – our value is on producing people and so we really tried to stay in our lane.

Our chambers are supportive. They want to see businesses get what they need. And they see this as a smart way to respond to the needs of their membership - their business membership. Chambers have been cheerleaders from the beginning.

Our chambers are not super-engaged in this stuff. They really do defer to us on the workforce front and so they take a more cheerleading role. And they have often opened up their rolodex to help populate our skill panels. Because they recognize that if they can get their members connected to our work, it creates value for them.

Because if we are actually being responsive to their membership, who have worked for these needs, then that's viewed as being value added by the chamber. So they just work with us as partners and cheerleaders. And they like to connect their businesses to our work, because they know that it positions them for a potential solution down the line.

MR. COHEN: Hey Andrew, I wonder if real quickly you could tell the story – so you've actually helped influence the chambers and the economic development – you said there's dozen of economic development organizations across the region - in how they approach businesses with the workforce questions. You created some common questions I think, right?

MR. MCGOUGH: Yeah. So we have a regional economic group. And as I mentioned earlier, there's more than 60 economic development organizations within our seven-county collaborative. So there's a lot of them and most of them – 80 percent of economic development is really working with existing companies and trying to figure out what their challenges and issues are. And then seeing if there's ways to solve that, and create growth. And increasingly what they were hearing at workforce was a big challenge for them.

And so we worked with our economic development folks to say all right, here's a set of questions; if someone said, yeah, I can't find qualified workers. Here's a set of questions that, if you asked them, you can actually turn to us and then we'll respond to those questions on your behalf. So again its sort of this symbiotic relationship where you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Because in the absence of having us at the table, our economic development organizations really aren't resourced to solve workforce problems or to generate workforce solutions. That's really what we do and we do really well.

And so this creates again, a way for our economic developers to increase their profile with their companies, because they can actually bring solutions to the table through the workforce collaborative.

MR. COHEN: Excellent. Thanks. Who else?


MR. : Hello?

MR. COHEN: Yes. Please, go ahead.

MR. : This is Joel. I'm from northwest central Illinois. I was wondering how many staff people did you have working on this?

MR. MCGOUGH: So that's a good question. In my organization I had four staff because we have four targeted industries. So there's a manager and then he has four staff people, one assigned to each of our targeted industries. And then similarly in southwest Washington – and by far I'll just be honest with you, we are the biggest organization in the collaborative so we have more capacity.

But I think to the north in Washington State, they have probably three people dedicated, one of them would have two industries, but the other two would be dedicated to this chair industry and it would be the same in the county to the south. So probably about seven or eight people who are dedicated to the industry engagement model and the feedback to the liberty system.

MR. : Okay. Thank you.

MR. : Hello, Andrew. This is Danny from Sacramento.

MR. MCGOUGH: Hey, Danny.

MR. : I was wondering, the workforce collaborative, could you share some of the successes and challenges they had with engaging our secondary education partners in that career pathway movement that is so critical for our young adults?

MR. MCGOUGH: Yeah. Boy, that's a good – that's an awesome question. So I mentioned that part of our business engagement model is – sort of the culminating thing are these plans. And I would be happy to share our current plans if anybody is interested. And we literally will have three goals. So we want to make sure that again, we're measured in what we're saying we can and can't deliver.

But every industry, bar none, is concerned about the youth pipeline and its one of their hot concerns. In manufacturing it was the second highest concern for them; in healthcare it was the top concern for us; in construction it's the top concern for them. So we have a responsibility to sort of figure out, what is our role in that.

Because here's the – my own personal bias and stuff in secondary education – I know it's a problem. I know it's a challenge and frankly, if we could solve a lot of the stuff that's going on in secondary education, we would solve a ton of these workforce challenges.

But there are so many voices in that discussion and when I sat around my 37 member board of directors, I bet I would get 35 different opinions about how to solve those problems and as a


result I tried to avoid that conversation, but when you're trying to be a response to the industry and they're like, ah, this is a big issue for us.

So what we've been doing – we have a summer jobs program that does involve the K-12 system. We have convened regional career and technical education providers for both healthcare and manufacturing, so we convened those sort of – as a sub-group of the skill panel and we bring – so we bring CT instructors and others to the table. And match them up with our industry folks to talk about ways in which industry might better inform what's going on in the K-12 system.

A lot of the work that folks are interested in having done is marketing to kids in the system. So we've done some work in that regard. We also have done some evaluation work. Again I'll stick with manufacturing because it's top of my mind. So we heard from industry and they're like, aw, man, we've got to get more kids interested in manufacturing. And so we were like, well, what's the baseline?

And so we did some work and we worked regional work again. And we found that there were 50 different – and actually this was the minimum of 50 – different K-12 programs in the regional school system, that had programs that were intended to get kids interested and engaged in manufacturing. The challenge was there was no connection between these 50 programs, and the variability – you could find one which was a 500-word essay about what it means to work in manufacturing, all the way up to a three-month internship.

So helping the industry understand sort of, the broad variety of things in there, and then figuring out what can we do to actually influence the curriculum and what's being taught to kids in there. And so we did a campaign around the certified production technician certificate and trying to interject that as an outcome for these K-12 programs that were all geared towards getting kids engaged in manufacturing.

And then also trying to figure out better ways to track whether or not these kids actually went into manufacturing jobs. Because the other irony in all that was when we looked at the number of kids that were participating in the region, there was 4,000 kids that were engaged in these manufacturing things, which if all 4,000 of those kids decided to go into manufacturing, we would have had a surplus of workers.

So I don't know that that's an answer to your question and we're still trying to figure it out but we try and just create an environment where industry understands what's going on in the K-12 system. And then really trying to very specifically target areas that we think can add value to the industry and also for the educators. So just trying to focus on areas that we think we can help in that discussion is really what we try to do, but it's still a work in progress for us, as well.

MR. : Thank you.

MR. : Hello.

MR. COHEN: Hold on. We'll get to you. Let's try to do two more questions. So we've got about two –three minutes. So go ahead, please.


MR. : Okay. This is Carl in California, about six blocks away from Danny who just asked a question, and had it answered. I wondered whether the topic of apprenticeship ever came up in your work with these employers.

MR. MCGOUGH: Yeah. All the time. And we have helped resource a number of apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship curriculum and services as a result. We did a mechatronics apprenticeship model in partnership with Portland Community College on the manufacturing side. We've done – we support a broad number of pre-apprenticeship programs in the building and construction trades, specifically designed to help women and minorities pursue careers in the trades.

We've worked with – unions are very active members of our skill panels. Everyone from electrical workers to sheet metal workers to carpenters are actively engaged in our panels, and have done a lot of work with us to create bridge programs, if you will. So kids coming out of high school, or transitioning out of high school, they have a place to go to hone their skills around whatever trade they're interested in.

We've done a number of non-traditional sort of apprenticeships, particularly in the IT world, where we use a combination of work experience and on-the-job training, coupled with specific occupational skill training in a classroom setting.

So we've put together some not-registered, but non-traditional sort of apprenticeship models in industries that we think are hurting for employees, but they're not ready to go a formal apprenticeship route. But again that's another area that we're super-interested in and we think has a whole lot of potential.

We write a lot of OJTs in our region. I think last year we probably did about 1,500 OJTs. All of them are connected to our targeted industries. We see OJT as a huge tool. And we see that as sort of – as a gateway activity to additional training by an employer, so we think of that as sort of a quasi-apprenticeship model. So we're still experimenting but have had some real good success with that.

MR. COHEN: And you're doing – it sounds like you're doing it on an industry-wide scale which is impressive, too.

I know someone is trying to jump in, but we actually – we do have to stop. It's a hard stop. It's a one-hour-call. But I will say this. So there is an opportunity to continue the discussion online. We will send out instructions how to do that. But I'm going to tell you right now so you know.

If you go to the ION site, that is I-O-N and that's WorkforceGPS and EPA site, you'll see a link to discussion topics on the ION page. You scroll down to the bottom. You'll see a discussion thread that's associated with this call. And you go in there and you can post a comment and we'll have discussion. We can answer questions that way, and we can use the questions to bring up on the next call.


But I apologize, I have to close this. Andrew, this is fantastic. I really appreciate your time on this and offering your expertise. And again thank you and thank you all. Stay tuned all for the next call next month. We will let you know who that is and what that is, shortly.

MR. MCGOUGH: All right. Thank you everybody.

MR. COHEN: Thanks.

MR. MCGOUGH: Bye-bye.

(END)


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