Thanks to wanderingone on Flickr!

“The Economy.” The phrase suggests one economy – as if our experiences of markets and the forces that shape them are universal. But we experience different economies, based on the industries in which we work, the particular jobs we hold, the communities in which we live, and our own unique circumstances.

Some people have suffered (real) wage declines for decades and have little experience of “the economic booms” that carried the country through the late 1990s and mid 2000s. And today, the similar economic experiences of people thousands of miles apart can make them seem like neighbors.

National Public Radio and its affiliate stations have been delving into this story – sharing the experiences of resilient people and painting an aural mural of the secular transformations underway.

Three noteworthy examples follow.

• All Things Considered‘s week-long series on southeast Michigan. Today’s story featured the state’s flagship transition program, No Worker Left Behind, Macomb Community College, Macomb/St. Clair Michigan Works, and some very courageous Michigan workers and students.
• Frank Langfitt’s Shifting Jobs, Adapting Workers series (NPR) profiles workers transitioning out of the North Carolina’s shrinking furniture industry, while the industry itself moves overseas. Set in Lenoir (Caldwell County), NC, this is the story of large-scale economic change in a small town, helped along by Caldwell College and Google.
• The Rural Economy Project. More than a collection of (great) stories, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) is connecting people to each other and to resources that help their communities thrive. (Hat tip to The Oregon Consortium & Oregon Workforce Alliance, and all the other sponsors).

Full disclosure: CSW advises the State of Michigan on workforce, energy, and economic issues, and supports Michigan Public Radio – many of our employees are also members of their own public radio stations across the country, including OPB).

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Kim Didier is from Newton, Iowa, a little town of 15,000 that rests smack-dab in the middle of the state.   In my imagination she regularly belts out would-be top-40 hits in the shower, but only when she’s not on tour with her entourage and counting the millions she’s made from going platinum.  In reality, Kim’s—well—totally normal.  She’s friendly, inquisitive, entirely approachable, and generally nice to be around.  She has a professional haircut and sports business casual with the best of ‘em.  So, what makes her so undeniably cool?

Regional Economic Crisis
In 2001, Maytag Corporation, which had been headquartered in Newton for 113 years and employed 4,000 people at its peak, announced it would reduce the local labor pool by moving to new facilities in Mexico.  On October 25, 2007, Maytag ceased operations in Newton for good, with closure of both a production facility and corporate offices.  That day, a final 1,800 Maytag employees lost their jobs.

Townsfolk began going through the seven stages of grief, starting with shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, and depression.   People might have gotten stuck there but, rather than wallowing in their sorrow, the common loss brought the community together.  Community leaders, including Kim Didier, pounced on the opportunity to shift negative energy focused on confusion, grief, and anger to more constructive purposes.

Taking Action
Like any good counselor, Kim called on community residents to do a little role playing.  The process started off with something called “The Futures Game.”  An Australian “gent” from rural Australia, David Beurle, led the exercise, which helps people understand how, when faced with tough futures about growth and development, different choices at critical points in time can lead to drastically different community outcomes.  This process led to development of a community vision, steeped in the understanding that if people stray from the decision or don’t make collaborative, mission-driven choices, the community’s future outcomes could be sharply affected.  Salt brines or development

In addition, Kim prodded the community to participate in a process called “network weaving.” This entails understanding how strongly connected community leaders are to one another, where their passions and expertise intertwine, and how they view one another as collaborators, innovators, and trusted partners.  U.S. national intelligence agencies use the process to understand the effectiveness of terrorist networks, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has employed the technique to control deadly infections in hospitals.  Kim Didier and her peers employed the process to understand how to most effectively move their community forward.

Did these hokey processes really make a difference for Newton?  The answer is an irrefutable “yes.”    These processes helped the community establish common desired outcomes and rallied leadership around it—fully leveraging the full strengths of the communities assets and building trust relationships that have allowed the community to move forward.  Today, Newton isn’t “formerly the home of Maytag.” They are at the center of innovation, becoming a manufacturing and design hub for state-of-the art wind turbines and, with just one employer, home to 400 new, related jobs.

Recovery
Slowly but surely, the town is moving through its phases of grief: the upward turn, reconstruction, and acceptance and hope in abundance.   This transition was possible because some folks dared to do the unthinkable—to step back, create a vision, create safe spaces to build trust, and understand how to focus community leaders’ energy at the right places at the right time.

What do you call someone who recognizes the need for this kind of process and gets the buy-in to make it happen? Yep–that’s a “Rock Star” in my book.

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Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo Romaní in Flickr.

NOTE: This is the third in our recent “let’s share the findings from all those OECD reports with each other (and the world)” series. Again, the content is not likely scintillating, but it’s important to us, and we’re happy to let you in on it.

The OECD Designing Local Skills Strategies Report (2009) focuses largely on questions of balance in locally designed workforce strategies: balance between short- and long-terms needs, balance between training and placement, balance between meeting the needs of people, firms, and communities, and balance between workforce players – private, non-profit, and a diverse collection of government agencies at different levels.

Authors Francesca Froy, Sylvain Giguère, and Andrea Hofer offer case studies of the following communities:

• Shanghai (China)
• Michigan (U.S.)
• Choctaw Tribe (Mississippi, U.S.)
• Mackay (Australia)
• Malmö (Sweden)
• New York City (New York, U.S.)

While, other communities are also cited in the narrative, these communities’ launched initiatives representing what the report calls balanced strategies, the authors’ recommended approach. Balanced strategies focus simultaneously on:

• Attracting and retaining talent
• Integrating disadvantaged groups
• Upskilling those in employment – though in most cases, this was the most difficult strategy because of its complexity (designing opportunities for working adults, often with families).

The report concludes by recommending that local workforce actors seeking to implement effective (and balanced) approaches focus on five key strategic issues:

• Access to relevant data and information. Local actors need to understand their “skills ecology” and its impact on the wider economy to be able to design appropriate policy and program interventions.
• Balanced and long term strategies. It is tempting for local actors to focus on only one or two strategic objectives. Focusing on all three areas is more difficult, but also promises to deliver more substantive impact over time.
• Batter mapping of skills provision, for example through “career clusters” or “career ladders.” This provide a focus for otherwise disjointed systems and creates opportunities for individuals to advance in meaningful ways. However, careers advice is a key (and often lacking) component of this approach.
• Building strong relationships with employers. While necessary to ensure effective connecting of supply and demand, public-sector and non-profit entities can play an important role in emphasizing long term needs and suggesting changes in workplace practices in ways that round out employer’s tendency to focus on short-term needs.
• Look to the future and anticipate change. Skills strategies should be subject to regular review and change, and should build toward local areas of “flexible specialization” (sometimes called workforce or talent competencies, or clusters of talent) that encourage the development of local talents and skills that are specific enough to make the community distinctive, but broad enough to avoid dependency on narrow industries or occupations.

Not rocket science, but it does take determination – people who do this work rely on persuasion and trust, not hierarchy.

Leadership and Governance Really Matter

While the report does not emphasize leadership and governance as a theme, the frequency with which the difficulty of this work is noted in the narrative is striking.  Meeting many diverse public and private needs, balancing the short and longterm, collaborating with large and changing networks of partners absent a structure, meeting shared national policy needs and in a local (and sometime divergent) context, developing and allocating resources fairly and in ways that deliver results – this is complex work all over the world, and speaks to the level of management expertise and leadership talent it takes to do well.

What’s our strategy for developing the workforce workforce?

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Thanks to Flickr pal woodleywonderworks.

NOTE: This is a continuation of the series we warned you about a few days ago. We are summarizing several large reports for each other (members of the Community Team at CSW), but we’re doing it here so you can benefit too – you know, if you are interested (since you found your way here for some reason). You won’t find a lot of wit, but there might be some wisdom for the taking.

One thing we love about OECD reports (and international comparisons generally for that matter) is that they remind us that the challenges we face are more universal than we think – and we can learn from looking up and out. On this count, More than Just Jobs: Workforce Development in a Skills-Based Economy does not disappoint.

At its core, the paper argues that although workforce development – the ecosystem of people, policies, and organizations concerned with the intersection of people, skills, jobs, and the economy – has been primarily concerned with narrow targets, transactions, and sets of activities, the field has an increasingly important role to play in improving the prosperity of communities. Author Sylvain Giguère suggests a broader goal for workforce development than the field (on the whole) has adopted to date:

“The comprehensive management of human resources, so as to better meet the demands of a global economy at both the national and local levels, through improving economic competitiveness and social cohesion.”

The reports names governance - leadership, policy coordination, adaptation of policy and program to diverse local conditions, and community engagement – as among the most significant challenges faced by workforce organizations seeking to advance this important aim. It calls for local policy to reflect a better balance between national aims and local needs and greater experimentation throughout the system, tempered with efficiency and accountability.

Policy Recommendations
A comparison of policies in seven OECD countries (United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and Korea) yielded the following recommendations:

• Inject flexibility into management. Decisions about strategic priorities in the implementation of public programs and services should be made locally, using a management by objective framework negotiated with central government.
• Establish an overarching management framework that embeds local flexibility to ensure alignment while also encouraging differentiation and experimentation.
• Build strategic capacity. Local staff should have strong knowledge of local economic conditions as well as effective human resource development practices, and the analytical and strategic capacity to be able to set priorities and development methods for addressing them.
• Build up local data and intelligence. The ability to aggregate and organize data in a way that supports local strategy development is essential and could be better supported by national level efforts to develop tools that adapt to local circumstances.
• Improve governance mechanisms. Labor market and workforce organizations should collaborate with education, economic development, business, and civic organizations. There is no governance mechanism for this kind of collaboration, but networks of partnerships go a long way in increasing and extending the capacity of workforce organizations.
• Improve administrative processes. Aligning policies through institutional reform is a difficult challenge, exacerbated by the scale of larger countries. Still efforts should be made to review the cross-agency implementation of broader workforce policy with the aim of better promoting collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Other Findings

• Workforce development matters because it directly impacts four drivers of economic growth: Skills, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Social Cohesion.
• Three major obstacles impede adoption of the broader goal of workforce development: 1) speeding up education and training systems; 2) fragmentation of local decision-making and workforce resources; and 3) lack of willingness to look long term. All of these could be ameliorated though larger investments and more serious support for governance (collaboration).

Case Studies: Out of Date?
Warning: Although the paper was published in 2008, the analysis of the U.S. Workforce System is very dated. It builds from the original six Workforce Investment Act (WIA) principles (one of which was “strong boards” which was summarily eliminated from WIA implementation documents within a matter of months). Baldridge work (ancient history when I realized I’d become part of the “field” of workforce development in 2003 or so) features prominently, and some of the organizations named in the local case studies have long since been replaced, some more than once.

Having some context from my work in the UK from 2001-2003 (in economic and workforce development), I could see that the U.K. case study was also quite dated, though Departmental names, and configurations change more frequently there (often coinciding with budget reviews).

This made me somewhat suspect of the case study portions of the report, but the larger trends and recommendations identified in the content chapters seem quite sound.

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