“Careers in 2 Years” Part 2 — Cultivating a Skilled Workforce to Meet a Growing Demand in Berks County

Manufacturing has always been a vital part of Berks County’s economy. “We have almost twice as many people involved with manufacturing as the counties that are contiguous to us, in great part because of the legacy of manufacturing in Berks County,” says Jon Scott, president of Greater Reading Economic Partnership (GREP). “We are known for having people with that skill set.”

With nearly 600 manufacturers in the county, many in hi-tech industries requiring workers with specialized skills, the demand for qualified workers exceeds the current supply. “Right now, in Berks County alone, over 45 percent of the manufacturing workforce is getting to be over 45, 50 and even 60 years old,” Scott explains. “We know that the gap is going to widen. How do we fill this pipeline?”

To address the current and projected shortage, GREP, along with workforce development partners Reading Area Community College, Berks County Workforce Investment Board, Reading Muhlenberg Career & Technology Center, and Berks Career & Technology Center launched the “Careers in 2 Years (CI2Y)” campaign in 2012 to raise awareness about attractive career opportunities available in Berks County to those with two-years of advanced training and education, and address perceptions that technical education doesn’t provide successful career pathways.

“When we started going through the whole concept, we realized we had manufacturers that were posting jobs that are available right now. Roll back the clock a few years, unemployment was much higher than it is now and yet businesses were not seeing enough people apply for these jobs with the right skill sets,” said Scott. “So what’s wrong? We thought it was a perceptual issue.

“Essentially, Careers in 2 Years is a multi-media advertising campaign and messaging tactic to try to let people know that at this point in our evolution as a country, as a state, as a county and contiguous counties, that it is no less viable for someone to consider attending a career and technology center, or a community college, than it is to consider going to a more traditional four-year liberal arts college environment,” Scott said.

GREP staff and partners have made well over 100 “business expansion and growth visits” to local companies in Berks County over the past few years. “They say one of their biggest dilemmas is finding the people that can do machining, welding, fabricating and ‘mechatronics’,” Scott said. “Reading Area Community College has one of the top mechatronics programs in the entire United States, and it’s right here in our back yard. We have people commuting from other counties because of the caliber of the program. That’s where a lot of the jobs are going, with a combination of the mechanical engineering, electronics, and robotics, because as machinery is starting to replace some people, new people are going to need to come in not only to operate those machines, which will require a different skill set, but also to know how to repair the machines when they go down.”

Phase 1 of the CI2Y initiative specifically targeted young people — those who are either still in high school or their first couple of years of college. “We reached out to those individuals who were not getting where they thought they might be, or wondering what really would work out well,” Scott said. “We encouraged them to take a look at this type of training that would be for various types of manufacturing, and then be able to get that training and go right to a great company. There are hundreds of manufacturers literally right here in Berks County that are doing amazing things, and some who are traditional in terms of their protocols, but the need is there and the jobs are paying well. And then people can get settled and have multiple opportunities going forward to get on and off a career training ladder,” he said.

In spite of early indications that Phase 1 is beginning to produce results, “ . . . the demand is still high,” said Scott. “The pipeline is not being replenished as vigorously or as completely as people would like to see, and that really drives home the importance of repeating the message. We need to get more people involved with this. Definitely the need is there.”

As Phase 1 of the CI2Y effort is ongoing, GREP and its partners recently launched Phase 2 of the campaign, targeting unemployed individuals, underemployed individuals and returning military veterans.

“We realized very definitively that there’s a whole other generation of individuals that this application is equally well-suited for,” says Jon Scott. “Underemployed (high education but nothing available in their field), unemployed for various reasons (layoffs), and returning veterans who have dedicated in some cases many years of their lives serving their country, and realize the military has given them some really great skills. They need a little bit more refined and specific training in some areas, but these are people who typically understand what it means to report on time. To pay attention. To stay focused. To use initiative. To think clearly yet use their creativity. What a great win-win for employers and potential employees when these two things come together and those dots are connected,” he said.

“So we’ve done a second iteration of the campaign. It’s still very similar because the focus is on manufacturing, but it’s to really getting people to take a look at getting the training they need to backfill any skill sets and go right into employment opportunities,” Scott said. “We’re looking at ways to deepen the development of internship programs, even apprenticeship type of scenarios. That is really a win-win.”

“We know that manufacturing is here to stay, especially in Berks County,” Scott continued. Offshoring is coming back to a certain extent for many things. All the stars are lining up to say this is the time to push more aggressively than ever before on trying to facilitate the encouragement of people going and getting this kind of training.”

“The next step for us, at the end of this year or sometime in 2016 would be to take this to a different level, because we know that healthcare and medically-related jobs are going to be in abundance, and the need is going to be plentiful going forward, and that’s been confirmed by all sources,” Scott explains. “So we want to do the same type of messaging for people to get training there, whether its electronic transfer/electronic medical records keeping; phlebotomy; highly specialized therapies that go beyond speech, physical, occupational, and respiratory therapy, and other skills.”

For additional information, please visit www.Greaterreading.com and www.CareersIn2Years.com

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