Wednesday, October 26, 2011

MHT Innovation Report

Campuses, Mass. aim efforts at business need

By Jim Schakenbach, Special to Mass High Tech

While Massachusetts has been blessed with a relatively low unemployment rate — just 7.4 percent in September, compared to 9.1 percent nationally — it’s still unacceptably high. In fact, it’s a robust five points higher than 10 years ago. So why are technology companies here having such a hard time finding acceptable employees?

Part of the problem lies in the gap between corporate needs and educational reality. Massachusetts has always been an entrepreneurial state, with an economy strong in technology — in fact, one out of every 10 workers is employed in technology. But fast, flexible startups need employees possessing what Jeremiah Riordan, Mt. Wachusett Community College’s assistant VP of lifelong learning and workforce development, calls “cross-functional skill sets.”

“The age of the specialist is gone,” says Riordan. “The business world needs people with cross-functional skills — someone with tech skills, but also human resource skills, and who can also go out and sell.”

Stephen Flavin, vice president and dean of academic and corporate development at Worcester Polytechnical Institute, echoed that sentiment: “Companies are really looking for people who are not just technical experts, but also have project management and leadership skill sets.”

So what’s happening to help technology companies, workers, and academia meet these new demands and develop a workforce that’s well-trained and employable? Quite a bit, it turns out — starting with strategies designed to fill both short-term needs and long-term goals.

One major factor in this joint public and private sector effort is a $20 million workforce development grant Massachusetts recently received as part of a nationwide grant program funneling $500 million into community college workforce development.

“We’re looking to develop training programs that meet the needs of technology companies,” says Joanne Goldstein, Massachusetts Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development. “We’re also figuring out the best way to establish technology training centers. You need a lot of expensive equipment, so to avoid wasting money by duplicating programs, we’re looking for ways to create programs strategically to provide enough opportunities for businesses and individuals.”

Part of that effort, according to Goldstein, is pushing for transferable credits, enabling community college students to transfer easily from school to school to take advantage of different training programs that individual community colleges might offer to help broaden their skill sets.

Pooling resources
To help determine what needs to be done to ensure that Massachusetts technology companies have access to a sustainable pool of qualified workers, Goldstein participated in a recent White House Business Council Workforce Development Roundtable, held in July at the UMass Boston Venture Development Center. During the roundtable, Goldstein met with 20 Boston-area high tech and life sciences executives to figure out how to best meet their employment and training needs.

To provide easier, more user-friendly access to workforce training funds, Goldstein says the state has made two significant changes. “We now have a special process whereby small businesses can get together, aggregate their training interests, and apply as one training entity for a workforce training fund grant,” says Goldstein. “That really helps entrepreneurs, because they often don’t have the in-house resources to apply or enough workers to train, so to be able to combine their training interests with other companies enables them to access training funds in a way they couldn’t before.”

Campus outreach efforts
The other major change, added Goldstein, has been to enable companies to partner with community colleges when applying for workforce training funds, providing more access to training at more reasonable costs.

For their part, both two- and four-year colleges and universities are taking hard looks at how they structure their certificate and degree programs to better address the realities of the new work environment. WPI, for example, is developing a new Biomanufacturing Education and Training Center (BETC) to address the immediate needs of bioscience companies. “The BETC will be focused on the fundamentals of operator-level biomanufacturing,” says Flavin. “The goal is to get people skilled up very quickly, in a very applied way, so they can be productive on day one, when they’re hired.” The center is scheduled to open in late 2012. 

Riordan says Mt. Wachusett Community College is partnering more with businesses, working to address their needs directly, “rather than being a bunch of academics sitting in a room and deciding on our own that this is what we think industry needs.”

By designing training programs that help employees move up, entry-level jobs open up, Riordan added.

So what would all these experts like to see happen in the near future to further drive down the unemployment and technology jobs vacancy rates? All agree that funding needs to be made available to help current workers receive financial aid to improve their skills and training through non-credit programs. 

They would also like to see the private sector get more skin in the game.

“Clearly we need employers to get more invested in the workforce development process. Many already are, and we’re working with others to get them more invested,” says Goldstein. “We’re asking employers to be more open in their hiring — recognize that there are lots of people out there with good skills and great work ethics who, with some training, can perhaps be the perfect employee.”