Workforce Development is Economic Development

Pennsylvania is investing in jobs, skills, education and training. The challenge will be to make them work as one economic strategy.

Economic development is usually described in the language of investment. A company expands. A new employer chooses a region. Capital is committed. A facility is built. Jobs are announced.

Important achievements, to be sure. But the individual successes do not determine whether the promised economic growth will follow.

Who is going to do the work?

The question is not simply whether enough people live nearby. Are people being prepared with the skills those jobs require? Do educators know what employers will need next, not just what they need today? Can workers see a pathway into the opportunities being created?

We tend to assign those questions to workforce development. But treating workforce as the response to economic development gets the sequence wrong. The ability to develop the people that an economy will need is itself a condition of sustainable growth.

Workforce strategy, then, cannot begin after the investment decision, the expansion, or the jobs announcement. It belongs in the economic-development strategy cycle that made those outcomes possible in the first place.

Workforce is not something that follows economic development. It is part of the infrastructure that makes economic development possible.

And Pennsylvania offers a particularly interesting place to test that idea.

Pennsylvania Is Creating Opportunity

The Commonwealth is pursuing economic growth while making substantial investments in the people needed to support it. Pennsylvania identifies High Priority Occupations using labor-market information and regional input. It is expanding apprenticeship and work-based learning. Its Industry Partnerships bring employers together with education, workforce development, economic development, labor and community organizations around the needs of important industries.

Higher education is increasingly part of the same conversation. Pennsylvania’s statewide strategic plan for higher education expressly identifies the Commonwealth’s workforce-development and economic-development needs among its priorities. At the same time, Pennsylvania continues to compete for private investment, business expansion and new jobs.

These efforts matter. More importantly, they suggest that Pennsylvania increasingly recognizes that economic development, workforce development and education are connected.

But recognizing the connection is not the same as making the connection work. That may be the Commonwealth’s larger opportunity.

Who Is Responsible for Connecting the Pieces?

Economic-development organizations attract investment. Employers grow and hire. Educators prepare students. Workforce organizations train and place people. Apprenticeship creates pathways. Government establishes priorities and invests resources.

Each can do its job well. Who makes sure workers can see and reach the opportunities being created? Who ensures that employers are helping build the talent they will need rather than simply looking for it after the need becomes urgent?

In other words:

Who is responsible for making sure all the individual successes add up to economic growth?

If the answer is everyone, the practical danger is that it becomes no one. There is a paradox at the center of workforce and economic development:

Every participant can succeed by its own measures while the ecosystem fails.

An economic-development organization can attract investment. A college can graduate students. A workforce organization can place people. An apprenticeship program can expand. An employer can hire. Government can successfully deploy funding. Each is a genuine success.

But if they do not respond to one another, Pennsylvania can find itself repeatedly creating economic opportunity on one side while trying to assemble the workforce needed to support it on the other.

The cost is practical. Employers struggle to find people with the skills they need. Workers can miss better career opportunities being created around them. Education and training can lag changes in the economy. Business expansion can become harder or occur elsewhere.

And the community may have to solve essentially the same workforce problem again when the next economic opportunity arrives.

Workforce Is Infrastructure

Communities already understand the relationship between infrastructure and economic growth. Roads allow products and people to move. Broadband connects businesses and markets. Utilities, transportation and suitable sites influence where companies invest and whether they can expand.

A skilled workforce serves the same economic purpose. A region can have the land, roads, broadband and incentives to support growth, but if employers cannot find or develop the people required to operate and expand, an essential piece of its economic infrastructure is missing.

That means workforce strategy cannot begin after a company announces an expansion or employers report a shortage. It must begin with the economic future a region is trying to create.

Pennsylvania’s High Priority Occupations approach reflects some of this thinking. Labor-market information and regional expertise are used to identify occupations where demand and opportunity exist. That creates a useful signal. But the more difficult challenge is to make sure the signal travels.

Employer demand must influence education and training. Economic-development priorities must help shape workforce priorities. Workers need accessible pathways into those occupations. And information about what is working — and what is changing — needs to move back through the system.

That is the difference between having workforce programs and having a workforce strategy.

From Collaboration to Integration

None of this suggests that Pennsylvania’s institutions are not collaborating. The Commonwealth’s Industry Partnerships demonstrate exactly the opposite. Employers, educators, workforce organizations, economic-development organizations and other regional participants are already being brought together around industry needs.

Collaboration and integration are not quite the same thing. Organizations can meet, exchange information and support one another while largely continuing to make decisions within their own boundaries.

Integration means those relationships change decisions. What employers experience changes what educators teach. What economic-development organizations see coming changes where training and workforce investments are made. What workforce organizations learn about barriers facing workers changes how pathways are designed.

And what happens to people after training helps determine whether the investment worked.

The economy operates across institutional boundaries. A successful workforce strategy must do the same.

Collaboration shares information. Integration allows information to change decisions.

Employers Cannot Just Consume Talent

Integration changes the employer’s role in workforce development. The traditional division of labor is familiar: schools and colleges educate people, workforce programs help prepare them, and employers hire the finished product.

When qualified people are plentiful, that arrangement works. When they are not, we tend to describe the result as a talent shortage.

But persistent shortages suggest another possibility.

Employers may not be able simply to consume the workforce they need. They may have to help build it.

This is one reason apprenticeship and other forms of work-based learning are important to Pennsylvania’s economic strategy. Their value extends beyond training people for individual jobs. They create a direct connection between learning and actual employer demand.

Pennsylvania’s expansion of apprenticeship beyond the traditional building trades illustrates the opportunity. UPMC, for example, has established registered apprenticeships in surgical technology, pharmacy technology, diagnostic imaging specialty and registered nurse residency.

The larger lesson is not that every workforce problem should be solved through apprenticeship. It is that the employer no longer waits at the end of the education process. The employer becomes part of it.

That shortens the distance between what people are learning and what the economy needs.

The Next Opportunity Should Be Easier to Capture

A successful workforce investment should leave something behind besides the immediate result.

Educators should understand the industry better. Employers should be better able to develop talent. Workers should see clearer pathways into opportunity. And the region should be better prepared when the next employer expands.

Today’s success should make tomorrow’s opportunity easier to capture.

We Never Left Economic Development

Much of this discussion sounds like workforce development. We have talked about apprenticeship, education, skills, employers, workers, training and career pathways. But we never really left economic development.

A community that attracts investment but cannot provide or develop the people required to sustain it has not finished the economic-development job.

A community that educates people without connecting them to local opportunity risks preparing its skilled workforce to leave.

And a community that repeatedly responds to workforce shortages only after they emerge may solve today’s problem without becoming better prepared for tomorrow’s growth.

Pennsylvania has an opportunity to do something more. It can treat workforce not as a response to economic development, but as part of how economic development is conceived and executed from the beginning.

That does not require every institution to have the same mission. It requires their different missions to connect around a shared result: employers able to grow, people able to participate in that growth, and communities increasingly prepared for the opportunity that comes next.

The risk is that every participant can succeed by its own measures while the ecosystem fails. The opportunity is that every success makes the next success more likely.

That is workforce development. And it is economic development.