In 2009, eight leading Berks County organizations began collaborating to develop a new economic development plan for Greater Reading and Berks County.

Their efforts culminated with the June 2010 release of the Ride to Prosperity: Strategies for Economic Competitiveness in Greater Reading. In the fall of 2013, the coalition partners published, Ride to Prosperity Version 2.0, building on the original work plan and laying out a new vision for economic development in the coming years. The newly proposed strategies focused on five key areas: Entrepreneurship and Innovation; Workforce and Talent Development; Sites and Infrastructure; Quality of Place; and Business Friendly Berks — a new effort to bring top quality business expertise to help local governments redesign how they interact with local businesses in areas like zoning and licensing, and to become national leaders in providing high quality customer services. Elements of the plan were updated again in April 2015.

Over the next several issues, Route 422 Business Advisor will be providing a series of updates on key areas of the initiative. In this issue, we focus on Workforce and Talent Development.

Workforce and Talent Development

The initial goal of this initiative was to transform the County’s Career and Technical Education system so that area youth are better prepared to enter growing technical career fields and local employers can tap into a skilled and career-ready workforce.

Greater Reading Economic Partnership’s (GREP) award winning “Careers in Two Years” program’s initial efforts were to reach out to students and their parents, encouraging them to consider high paying careers in key manufacturing technology fields. These positions, which require post high school education short of a four-year degree, are known as middle skill jobs, and are projected to be the fastest growing employment segment in the US economy. By building a strong base of middle skill talent, Berks County not only provides promising career options to area youth, but it also benefits employers who will be attracted to Berks County thanks to its strong pipeline of skilled technical workers.

In 2014, the “Careers in Two Years” program expanded its outreach beyond young people entering the work force for the first time, targeting older individuals who might be under-employed, unemployed and returning veterans.

Dan Fogarty, Director of Workforce Development & COO of Berks County Workforce Development Board, recently updated Route 422 Business Advisor on the progress of the “Careers in Two Years” program and other efforts to meet the growing need for a skilled workforce in the vital technical manufacturing sector in Berks County.

“The word is getting out,” Fogarty said. “We’re seeing increased interest in technical manufacturing careers. If you think of ‘Careers in Two Years’ as a marketing campaign, all around the state when I talk to my peers, they say what we need is a marketing campaign to promote opportunities in manufacturing. With the ‘Ride to Prosperity’ and the good work that the partners in GREP did, we’ve had the campaign in place. It’s updated. And that message is getting out there into the community,” he said

Fogerty points out that there are also a couple of factors complementing the efforts of “Careers in Two Years.” — a federal grant and increased enrollment in technical schools. “W just participated in a federal grant,” Fogerty explains. “We partnered with four other workforce development areas, and Berks County did exceedingly well. It’s called the “Make It in America” grant. We had over 100 local individuals here in Berks County use some of that money to help offset the cost of going back and getting re-training in advanced manufacturing, predominately, but not exclusively, in industrial maintenance, at a training center here in Reading,” he said, adding, “That was a good mix of unemployed workers, which we call dislocated workers, some incumbent workers who went back to refresh their skills with their employer, and others who were working at other jobs outside the field and interested in getting into the field.”

“It’s taken five years to get this message out there,” Fogarty said, “and we have to continue, because it’s not the message that you hear in society at large, typically in the media. We found a lot of support for the message from local media such as yours. That message is getting out there.”

A clear indication that the message is getting out there is the Career and Tech Centers, including Berks Career and Technical Center, are looking at larger classes. “They are just about record levels at BCTC for the Career and Technical program,” Fogerty said,  “and that’s particularly interesting because the enrollment at their school districts has actually dropped overall, so basically the best way to say it is BCTC is gaining market share among high school students in a declining market as general enrollment in those School districts is down.”

Nevertheless, the skilled worker supply in Berks County is still a ways off from meeting the anticipated demand as more and more baby boomers reach retirement age.

“The challenge we have, it’s typically a two-four year pipeline to develop an individual with the good skills and motivation to become a competent entry-level advanced manufacturing technician,” Fogerty explains. “To get to the point where they are earning the employer more than they are costing the employer, as a rule of thumb, you can look at a two-year to four-year process.”

“Employers are engaged with us on it because the challenge is that we’re chasing a wave of baby boomer retirements in these companies,” Fogerty continued. “We have approximately 30,000 individuals working in manufacturing jobs in Berks County. That’s the largest single industry sector by employment, and by far by economic output. That’s pretty unusual. There aren’t many other regions around the state or the country that have retained that level of manufacturing base. Those numbers are down probably 25 percent from 15 years ago, but they’ve stabilized around 30,000. Actually, they were lower during the recession and we had a nice bounce back. What I like to say is, if we are successful in the manufacturing sector, ten years from now, we will still have 30,000 individuals employed in manufacturing.”

Of course that would benefit the local economy immensely, as the skilled tech-manufacturing sector has the highest paying average comp and benefits package, particularly through the middle skill jobs compared to other sectors.

“The challenge is, we’re starting to see the results of this work, but the numbers coming through the pipeline are not close to what we need to fill the projected retirements over the next five to seven years,” Fogerty said. He anticipates needing an additional 7,000 new entrants in manufacturing in the next five to seven years just to replace those individuals we know will be leaving through retirement and attrition. “The good news is that we’re actually ahead of most other regions in the country in re-building this pipeline and in getting the word out about the attractiveness of these types of jobs, and the nice thing about being here in Berks County is it’s a real nice combination of good quality jobs with a modest cost of living’” Fogerty said. “The two issues sort of reinforce themselves.”

Fogarty also said that the Technical Academies Pathways program set up with Reading Area Community College and the two career technical centers via the “The Ride to Prosperity” partners and the local Workforce Development Board is starting to show some dividends. “Think of the Technical Academy as basically an honors program for students at both Reading Muhlenberg CTC and Berks Career and Technical Center,” Fogerty said. “In these select programs, such as ‘Mechatronics,’ the students actually get college credits for some of the courses that are taught at the CTC. And then their senior year, they take their technical coursework at Reading Area Community College. So there’s a group of I think about ten students this year, graduating seniors from the CTC, who most of them graduated from high school with 27 credits that were free to them. Many of those kids are continuing toward their associates’ degree at Reading Area Community College and some others are actually going directly to Penn State Berks.”

For additional information about workforce development initiatives in Berks County, please contact Dan Fogarty at 610.988.1363, email: dfogarty@bccl.org.