Local Economy Must Engineer A New Course

Back in the 1960s, a memorable bit of career advice was offered to a young man in the movie “The Graduate.”

Plastics.

Today in Spokane and across the Inland Northwest, that one word of career advice might be: engineer.

This may sound odd, given the fact that local politicians and their agitated supporters keep suggesting the only jobs available in the region are those that require the phrase, “Fries with that order?”

Behind all the posturing about the need for more and better jobs, however, is this challenging reality.

Right now, the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene work force can’t keep up with the family wage, high-tech jobs waiting right here to be filled.

“Where do I start?” said Liz Cox, spokesperson for Agilent Technologies at Liberty Lake, the 1,000-employee high tech spinoff from Hewlett-Packard that builds testing equipment for cell phones and related wireless industries.

“We’re hiring in Spokane right now,” Cox said. “We have several dozen openings for electrical engineers, software engineers, all kinds of engineers.”

And don’t forget the dozens of entry-level assembly jobs at Agilent.

A few hundred yards away at the Telect headquarters in Liberty Lake, Judi Williams also has begun to wonder what people are talking about when they bemoan the lack of family wage jobs in high-tech fields.

“We’ve got all kinds of job openings right now,” she said of her company’s exploding fiber optic and telecommunications businesses.

“We’ve got 62 job openings in technical and professional fields. We’re talking engineers, buyers, facilities directors, production managers, marketing people.”

What gives? The problem isn’t a lack of jobs. Spokane’s unemployment rate is 6 percent and the state employment office is listing 15 to 25 new jobs every day.

If this region has a shortage of family wage and high-tech jobs, why are major employers having such a hard time filling their vacancies?

The answer offers a more complicated picture of local economic realities than the one being painted by political activists who have grown hoarse calling for political change and a shift to high tech.

We don’t have enough technically skilled workers to fill the jobs already available.

We have too many midrange or entry level workers with the wrong skills or work habits.

“If you are looking for trends in local employment. what you are seeing is growth at both ends of the spectrum and some losses in the middle,” explained Dan Lambert, job placement supervisor for Worksource Spokane, which tracks Spokane-area jobs for the state of Washington.

Lambert notes the regional work force is bifurcated into groups that don’t fit well into entry-level positions.

One group includes those with midlevel work histories from changing companies who now find themselves underemployed and not wanting to start over. The other consists of entry-level workers, many recently off welfare or with limited educations, who have no work history, don’t understand what it takes to keep a job and often have child-care problems.

So why not just recruit workers and businesses from the outside? The region’s peculiar national image makes that more difficult.

“I think there is a perceived lack of tolerance in our region, not just to minorities, but gay people and others,” said Agilent’s Cox.

That’s a turnoff for young engineers and high-tech workers who increasingly are nonwhite and who value diversity in the workplace and the community.

And then there is the in-fighting in local politics.

“It comes down to an attitude around here,” Cox said. “In other places it feels like a gold rush. Here, you don’t sense a great deal of vitality or energy.”

These realities aren’t reasons to give up on bringing new jobs to the area. They suggest, however, that politicians calling for more jobs or putting together one more global development plan for the region won’t do much to create them.

What might help?

At the low end of the employment ladder, the regional focus clearly needs to be on basic skill-building for entry-level workers and retraining for midlevel workers who have been displaced.

At the high end of the employment ladder, the Inland Northwest needs to track and hang onto every local student with an interest in engineering.

At the same time, the region must actively and dramatically confront its national reputation for intolerance. Agilent Technologies and Telect recognize these necessities.

“We find that the traditional selling points of the region are still important factors in recruiting,” said Agilent’s Cox. “The cost of housing is low. It’s a beautiful area. And if people like the outdoors, it’s a real plus for us.”

Agilent and Telect both make a point on their Web sites in recruitment to embrace diverse applications from women and nonwhites.

Each company aggressively recruits for local engineers.

Each offers in-house training and retraining programs.

These companies know what it really takes to create family wage, high-tech jobs in a fast-changing global economy.