Labor: Program Aims to Close Communication Gap
At a time when labor shortages are reaching a crisis point for certain industries, a group of local public officials and business leaders met recently to devise some solutions.
The event that drew about 200 educators, business people, labor and government representatives to the San Diego Convention Center on Sept. 29 was called Workforce Summit 2000.
For some, just the fact that top officials and business people sat down together in the same room and discussed common labor issues was an achievement.
“It was a damn good start,” said Judy Lawton, CEO of TLC Staffing, a local temporary employment agency. “We got educators and employers together, and we sat down and admitted to each other that we don’t really communicate very well with each other, we don’t really understand what we all do.”
The summit involved the participants dividing up into groups to discuss the existing skill gaps in the current local labor market, what the implications of that gap is, and how it might be rectified.
The skills gap is apparently getting wider in San Diego where the region has been generating thousands of new technical jobs, but companies creating the jobs are having a tougher time finding qualified workers to fill the jobs.
For example, within the computer and software cluster, employment nearly doubled to 17,658 over the last seven years and is expected to increase 13 percent annually, according to a report done by the San Diego Regional Technology Alliance.
Need Will Only Grow
The type of jobs in this cluster include computer programmers, computer engineers, systems analysts, and electrical and electronic engineers and are among the highest-paying in the region with an average salary of nearly $64,000 as of 1998, the report found.
“The bottom line is that we’re going to need between 3,000 to 5,000 engineers of all kinds over the next five years,” said Cliff Numark, president of the San Diego RTA.
In addition to the highly skilled technical jobs some industry clusters are creating, there are other types of jobs associated with technology but utilizing different skills, including professional marketing, administrative and other support positions, all geared to getting new products to market, Numark said.
Numark said the intent of the summit was to bring together representatives from the training providers, the schools and the consumers of those providers, namely the employers, to see if both groups can improve communication so training programs better match job openings.
“The fact is that training organizations often don’t have the best connections with their customers,” he said. “Programs don’t always match what the market needs.”
Larry Fitch, president of the San Diego Workforce Partnership, the region’s job training agency that organized the event, said the participation of key business leaders was significant.
Key Study Leads To Others
In the past, studies on labor shortages and possible solutions might have been done, presented to those in the training community, and then put on a shelf to be forgotten.
“We can’t afford to sit back and do another study,” Fitch said.
At the summit, the Workforce Partnership released detailed reports on seven industry clusters: biosciences, communications, digital new media, environmental technology, medical services, software and computer services, and the wireless industry.
The reports were prepared by the SourcePoint, the research arm of the San Diego Association of Governments and the RTA, and largely funded by the Workforce Partnership.
Included in the report on the local wireless industry was the fact that the number of firms operating here grew from 40 in 1990 to 160 in 1998, and that employment grew from 2,900 to more than 15,000 today.
The partnership plans to issue two more industry reports on the computer and electronics manufacturing cluster and the visitor services/entertainment cluster. The reports will be available at local libraries and from the partnership.
The reports’ findings and proposals discussed at the summit will be the basis for developing a long-term strategy for the region’s labor training needs.
The proposal is to be developed by a 32-member Regional Strategic Planning Committee co-chaired by Don Grimm, a local management consultant; Ted Roth, CEO of Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp.; and Stephen Weber, president of San Diego State University.
