State economies tied to ‘upskilling’ of workforce: Help for incumbent workers includes use of micro-credentialing, greater investments in community colleges

By
Laura Tomaka
|
Friday, December 13, 2019 at 05:16 PM
Marysville, Ohio, is home to the first Honda manufacturing plant in America. It opened in 1979 with 64 workers assembling the company’s Motocross motorcycle. Auto production soon followed. Now in its 40th year of production, the original plant, along with several nearby operations, employs 13,000 workers in the northwest part of the state.
Ohio Rep. Jon Cross, whose district lies just north of the Marysville plant, has visited the facility and seen the work being done there. “It’s highly technical, highly skilled,” he notes, more of what one might expect at a tech company rather than a car manufacturer.
More and more, that is the reality of work in manufacturing and other sectors of the Midwest’s economy — the result of advances in technology, automation and robotics. For states, that means economic growth depends in part on having a highly skilled, adaptable workforce able to keep up with the fast pace of change.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of June, there were 1.5 million job openings in the Midwest (see map for state-by-state data), and many businesses say they can’t find enough people with the necessary skills to fill the vacancies that they have.
Parts of this region, too, have among the lowest unemployment rates in the nation; Ohio’s is actually a bit over the national average, but it’s still only 4.2 percent.
“That basically means we’re at full employment, and that’s really great for the economy,” Cross says. “But the downside is that businesses are [struggling] to grow and find new employees.
“Where are these new employees going to come from?”
The answer to that question, in Ohio and other states, is more complicated than simply relying on new high school or college graduates. “Colleges are not pumping out enough people to fill the new positions that are going to be available in our workforce in the next three to five years,” Wisconsin Sen. Dan Feyen says about the labor market challenges in his state.
“So we need to make sure that we can take people within our existing workforce and put them in jobs where they can excel.”

CSG Midwest

State economies tied to ‘upskilling’ of workforce: Help for incumbent workers includes use of micro-credentialing, greater investments in community colleges

By
Laura Tomaka
|
Friday, December 13, 2019 at 05:16 PM
Marysville, Ohio, is home to the first Honda manufacturing plant in America. It opened in 1979 with 64 workers assembling the company’s Motocross motorcycle. Auto production soon followed. Now in its 40th year of production, the original plant, along with several nearby operations, employs 13,000 workers in the northwest part of the state.
Ohio Rep. Jon Cross, whose district lies just north of the Marysville plant, has visited the facility and seen the work being done there. “It’s highly technical, highly skilled,” he notes, more of what one might expect at a tech company rather than a car manufacturer.
More and more, that is the reality of work in manufacturing and other sectors of the Midwest’s economy — the result of advances in technology, automation and robotics. For states, that means economic growth depends in part on having a highly skilled, adaptable workforce able to keep up with the fast pace of change.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of June, there were 1.5 million job openings in the Midwest (see map for state-by-state data), and many businesses say they can’t find enough people with the necessary skills to fill the vacancies that they have.
Parts of this region, too, have among the lowest unemployment rates in the nation; Ohio’s is actually a bit over the national average, but it’s still only 4.2 percent.
“That basically means we’re at full employment, and that’s really great for the economy,” Cross says. “But the downside is that businesses are [struggling] to grow and find new employees.
“Where are these new employees going to come from?”
The answer to that question, in Ohio and other states, is more complicated than simply relying on new high school or college graduates. “Colleges are not pumping out enough people to fill the new positions that are going to be available in our workforce in the next three to five years,” Wisconsin Sen. Dan Feyen says about the labor market challenges in his state.
“So we need to make sure that we can take people within our existing workforce and put them in jobs where they can excel.”

CSG Midwest

Kentucky Representatives Cross Party Lines to Develop Engage and Empower Caucus

By
Sydney Geiger
|
Friday, November 1, 2019 at 12:00 AM

Two Kentucky representatives — Rep. Al Gentry and Rep. Brandon Reed — have crossed party lines to co-chair a caucus focused on issues facing people with disabilities. The bipartisan caucus is currently comprised of nine republicans and nine democrats.

Gentry, who lost his dominant arm in a workplace accident when he was 28, uses his experience to empower others through sports and advocacy, and hopes to see the caucus thrive in years to come.

“The mission of the Engage and Empower Caucus is to open up a direct pathway of communication for advocates of people with disabilities and the state legislature so that we [Kentucky] can more effectively and efficiently address the issues at hand,” Gentry said.

Given the wide-ranging goal of the caucus, it will be comprised of four subcommittees, including:

1. Healthcare and Insurance

Action Civics Education Policies Influence Representative Democracy

By
Jorden Jones
|
Thursday, October 24, 2019 at 11:26 AM

Civic education policies have begun to diversify over the past few years as state-level institutions have taken a holistic approach to become more involved in the administrative planning and support process. Included in the state-level changes are revamped curriculum standards, better professional support for educators and newly established assessment tools for classroom programs. New policies are making a difference in the quality of students’ education and civic engagement.

CSG Midwest

No shortage of ideas: In recent years, states have adopted many new policies to attract new teachers — and keep them in the classroom

By
Tim Anderson
|
Monday, September 23, 2019 at 01:27 PM
As a library media specialist in a Minnesota middle school, Rep. Mary Kunesh-Podein comes across potential teachers all the time. It’s the students themselves. “At our school, students are often mentoring other students, and we are flabbergasted at what we see,” she says. “They have the patience. They have the understanding. They connect well with that other student.
“And we think, ‘This kid would make such a great teacher.’”
As a legislator, Rep. Kunesh-Podein also thinks about this: What state policies could expose more of these young people to the profession, and get them on a path to becoming a teacher? One idea, part of a legislative proposal in Minnesota this year (HF 824/SF 1012), is to bring college-level, credit-bearing Introduction to Education classes into the state’s high schools; another is to identify and eliminate barriers (financial or otherwise) that stand in the way of lower-income individuals getting certified to teach.
Attracting more teachers, as well as retaining them, has been on the minds of many state policymakers in the Midwest, as evidenced by the burst of new legislative proposals, laws and investments over the past few years.

CSG Midwest