Working to attract young talent
Capital Region employers seek to entice, retain millennials, Gen Z professionals
For years, young talent bred in the Capital Region’s high schools and colleges would chase opportunities in big cities and leave behind their humbler beginnings.
Some still do, but the region has strategized ways to keep millennials and Gen Z workers around.
Katie Newcombe, the chief economic development officer at the Capital Region’s Center for Economic Growth, said there’s just as much competition to attract and retain young individuals here as there is in “almost every community, across the United States.”
The pool of 25- to 35-year-old job candidates is fluid. These employees are the most mobile, according to Newcombe, and unafraid to move around for work. She was hesitant to say whether the region is struggling to retain young workers but emphasized that employers work to keep them here and likely always will.
Brian Williams, executive director of the Capital Region Workforce Development Board, however, acknowledged that for 20 years or so, a “huge number of folks” left after obtaining a degree here.
But, the trend has changed in the last five to seven years.
“There’s been a number of individuals that have stayed in the area, they fell in love with the
Capital Region,” he said. And then there are those who return to the area after earning college and advanced degrees elsewhere.
A 2020 report from the CEG
showed that four in five SUNY graduates in the region were still living and employed in the state five years after graduation. It did not specify if those individuals were living in the Capital Region or elsewhere. Another CEG study found that 8 percent of Albany’s population were young professionals in 2015 and that five of the state’s top 12 cities with high concentrations of young employees were in the Capital Region.
Miriam Dushane, managing partner of Alaant Workforce Solutions, a local recruitment consulting firm and employment agency, said work-life balance is imperative to younger employees. When applying for jobs, they are looking for a company that will help them grow and be upfront about their culture.
“They are looking for things such as community involvement, giving back to the community, but also internally, from a company’s culture perspective, younger employees are looking for companies that provide a lot of
opportunity for growth, for learning,” she said. From her experience, younger workers were less interested in upward mobility and opted for more professional development.
Williams pointed to tag-team recruitment efforts between businesses and universities that showcase what the region has to offer while providing experience.
“Any of the successful companies in our region, and we have many, obviously, they have direct line(s) with the colleges, and specifically with the college career centers, as well as the department chair of individual colleges,” he said.
Williams said these businesses are going straight from the source, collaborating with schools to put on career fairs and internship programs that will bring future workers in sooner. Some are even looking at high schools for young talent in the making. Initiatives such as the Capital Region’s career exam connected high school students to local businesses for a first look into an industry.
General Electric, a national powerhouse with local roots in Schenectady County, does exactly that. The company partners with universities to create a pipeline for its Edison engineering program, a three-year rotation where early career engineers pursuing a master’s degree get to work alongside GE technologists on research and development.
“We will use those relationships that help us identify great early career talent about to graduate from their graduate programs, and help create a pathway and a connection for them to come do an
internship with us to try us on for size,” Tiffany Westendorf, the program’s leader, said.
Bringing them to the area allows the company to show them what they’ll find it like to work here and also to live in the Capital Region.
Katherine Quinn, one of GE’s Edison engineers and a Niskayuna native, moved back to the region and joined GE after graduating from Cornell University.
She decided to return to be closer to family, but also because Albany was more “attainable” than larger metros she spent time in, which she found to be isolating, expensive and difficult to make connections.
Quinn would like to see other young people put down roots in the Capital Region. She believes it helps build up business in the area, but more importantly a sense of community that she’s enjoyed. Working at GE, she often finds herself running into old high school classmates’ parents and catching up with them.
“Sometimes I think that when a lot of people move in and out, or there’s just exodus from smaller towns in the Capital Region, that that sense of community can
be lost,” she said.
GE’s program was Quinn’s gateway into a job where she wouldn’t pigeonhole herself and has job flexibility that allows her to research and work in areas beyond her specialty of material platform research. She said flexibility and career fluidity is a priority for millennial and Gen Z workers.
Newcombe said that while young people are drawn to the excitement of big cities, the region’s size offers quick career mobility, a facet that may sometimes be overlooked. But even so, efforts to keep young minds local won’t waver.
“I think we know that we always need to work together, to train our workforce to retain our workforce,” she said. “And we need to have pride in the region that we live in so that we can connect people to all the amazing things that are here.”