Anticipating Needs Companies Struggle To Find Workers With Required Skills While Employees Scramble To Meet Employer Expectations

FROM FOR THE RECORD (Tuesday, March 24, 1998): Correction Wrong degree: WSU-Spokane offers a master’s degree program in health policy and administration. A story in Sunday’s business section about work-force training incorrectly described the degree.

A Spokane manufacturing company is considering recruiting machinists from Ohio and Michigan because it can’t find enough skilled workers here.

Meanwhile, a 43-year-old Spokane man with 16 years of manufacturing experience is taking community college courses because his skills aren’t good enough to win him a job with companies like the one described above. The man had run out of opportunities for advancement at the company where he worked.

Both are elements of the problems within Spokane’s work force.

Companies are struggling to find skilled employees who can fill their quickly changing needs. And many employees are discovering they don’t have the skills to fill available jobs.

Those are some of the issues that will be addressed by the Workforce Development Summit, to be held at Spokane Community College March 31. The day-long seminar, co-sponsored by the National Alliance of Business and Focus 21, will seek solutions to the disparity between lack of skilled workers and employers’ needs.

The Spokane Area Chamber of Commerce’s work force development and education councils have worked to bring representatives from business, education, labor, government and the community together at the summit.

“We’ve got many of the elements in place,” said Joanne Murcar, development council coordinator for the chamber. “We just need to pull them together.”

In the year 2000, 65 percent of the country’s jobs will be skilled trades, the U.S. Department of Labor reports. That’s a huge change from the 1950s, when 60 percent of jobs were unskilled trades. Labor Department statistics also show that the percentage of professional jobs in the work force has held steady at 20 percent since the 1950s.

That, say educators and business people, means parents and students need to think more carefully about the form of higher education they select as children move beyond high school.

“There are many reasons to go to college, but a student who goes there without a focus is not going to succeed,” said Ted Clark, coordinator of Pathways, a regional school-to-work program. “About 30 percent of the students in the community colleges already have a bachelor’s degree and are back getting career training.”

It’s not an issue of pitting one form of education against another, said Jane Johnson, vice president for university advancement at Eastern Washington University. It’s a question of students and parents taking care to select a program that fits the needs of each student.

“Students and parents really need to take a look at options available to them,” Johnson said.

For many parents, those options don’t include technical skills training. Clark cited a 1997 KXLY Research Services survey showing that more than 80 percent of Spokane-area parents of high school students would like their children to complete a four-year college degree. However, said Clark, fewer than 20 percent of those students will complete a four-year degree before entering the work force.

“The results (of the survey) are basically that parents have high and unrealistic expectations for their kids,” said Steven Dean, research director for KXLY.

One focus of the summit will be the question of how to convince parents to consider a wider array of post-high school options.

“There’s kind of this stigma still that the manufacturing arena is this dark, dungeon-like closet,” said Mike Marzetta, manager of systems engineering for Altek, a Spokane Valley manufacturing company. “It’s really high-tech here. Everything’s computerized.”

Larry Stanley, chief executive of Empire Bolt and Screw and a member of the chamber’s education council, agrees.

“Parents think it’s a dead end, and it’s because of the old stigma of students who were sent off to the vocational classes. It’s a hard perception to break and the only way we’re going to do it is pound, pound, pound,” Stanley said.

Changes in the workplace are affecting the educational system at the earliest levels, said Scott Oakshott, who coordinates school-to-work programs for District 81.

“Curriculum coordinators are seeing a real need for career awareness that wasn’t there a few years ago,” Oakshott said. In coming years, he said, the average math, science and language arts teachers will be looking for more ways to apply lessons to the working world.

“One of my jobs is to build a system so that more kids can access school-to-career information. It’s showing them how their schooling is going to be relevant to their later lives,” Oakshott said. “I think sometimes what happens is we just concern ourselves with education and don’t look far enough forward to what kids will be using.”

School districts throughout the region already have found ways to give students a glimpse of work.

At District 81’s Skills Center on North Regal, students interested in trades bake bread in a chef training program, perform front-end alignments in an automotive shop and practice manicures in cosmetology. About 700 juniors and seniors from 32 regional high schools pass through the skill center every year, trying to learn the trades that will earn them jobs.

On Spokane’s South Hill, Rogers High School students are discovering a different working world. They’re at Sacred Heart Medical Center, learning about jobs available in the medical field.

Rogers High School junior Gabe Rioux, spends half of his school day working in the hospital pharmacy. Rioux wanted to be a doctor, but now he’s considering Washington State University’s pharmacy program. Rioux, 19, is a former high school drop-out who quickly learned how hard it is to get a job without an education.

“When I tried to get a job, they said, ‘You need a diploma.’ That’s when I decided to go back to school and get my education,” Rioux said.

Kendra Kaminski, a Rogers senior, has spent this semester working in the hospital’s respiratory department and now plans to enter a two-year program at Spokane Community College in respiratory therapy.

But students only represent the emerging work force. They’re only part of the equation.

Companies today are struggling to update the skills of employees who didn’t grow up in the computer age. Most fields in today’s work force are increasingly affected by technological changes, forcing companies to either hire employees with better skills or improve the skills of the workers they have.

Companies also decry the amount of basic skills job applicants have. Most companies need people who are better at working in teams, communicate more effectively and think more critically.

In response, colleges constantly reevaluate how well their programs fit the needs of the work force. That’s true for two- and four-year degree programs.

For example, WSU recently started a doctoral program in health policy and administration, said Alonzo White, WSU-Spokane’s director of regional support services.

“That need was espoused by the community and WSU responded,” White said. The university also is looking at whether engineering degree programs need to be added to the school’s Spokane branch, White said.

However, the task of producing workers trained in skilled trades has fallen largely on the shoulders of the community colleges.

That makes Mary Averett a busy woman. She is dean of instruction and district director for business and industry training for the Community Colleges of Spokane. Averett coordinates programs that re-train workers in everything from building furniture to answering customer service questions in call centers.

Several years ago, Harper’s, a furniture company in Post Falls, needed 400 people trained - fast. Averett’s division put together a training course on weeknights and weekends that spanned nine months. No one was paid to attend the course, and there was no guarantee people would be hired. But they needed to complete the course to be considered for a job. The program filled quickly.

The Principal Financial Group has a steady need for mainframe computer programmers, so Averett’s division added the appropriate community college courses.

“Every year, this program is going to graduate people who meet the needs of the Principal Financial Group,” Averett said. “They are going to be looking to that program to fill their needs.”

Re-training workers takes place at the community colleges or at the companies.

“We try to lower the barriers to people by going to their sites,” Averett said. “When people are working eight hours a day, it’s hard to access education.”

Right now, one of the biggest needs Spokane companies have is for skilled machinists. But those needs change as programs are put in place to address them, Averett said.

“Within a year, there will be graduates,” she said. “The likelihood we’ll have that need again will be less and less true once we fill the initial void.”

“These kinds of changes happen in various industries and it takes a while to catch up,” Averett said. “That’s what the goal of the summit is, to anticipate needs.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color) Graphic: Entering the workforce