Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Workforce training needs in spotlight
Summit focuses on ‘soft skills’
SPRINGDALE — Career education and job training can’t neglect the so-called soft skills, things such as working with or leading a team and managing time well, experts told hundreds of teachers, business leaders and others Wednesday.
The Chamber of Commerce’s third annual two-day Workforce Summit this week drew roughly 1,000 attendees, all to dive into the problem of making sure the area’s students and adults can get the skills they need to fill the jobs that need filling. Programs to train people to become nurses or electricians often dominate this sort of discussion, but Wednesday’s overriding theme was the kind of skill that’s useful in just about any occupation.
“We call them momma skills,” Perry Webb, the chamber’s president and CEO, joked.
Northwest Arkansas’ rapid growth and unusually low unemployment rate below 3 percent have left construction firms, health care systems and manufacturers desperate to fill middle-skill jobs that pay well and often don’t require the time or potential debt of a bachelor’s degree. Webb said the problem’s shown up to some degree all around the country.
In that environment, the most important factor in employers’ hiring decisions is often neither education nor experience but an applicant’s work ethic, Josh Davies, CEO of the Colorado-based consulting firm The Center for Work Ethic Development, told the audience. Good work ethic doesn’t necessarily mean being the first to arrive and last to leave but does mean using time fully and doing a job as well as possible.
Businesses are having such a hard time finding people with a good work ethic that it’s become a crisis, Davies went on. He pointed to less conversation between parents and children, fewer chores assigned to kids and fewer summer jobs taken by teens as the causes. He was careful not to blame Millennials, those born around the turn of the century, as a group.
“This is not a generational issue, it’s a societal issue,” Davies said. “The places we used to learn work ethic have been going away.”
Fixing the issue must start with showing people that it exists, because most people think their work ethic is just fine, Davies added. He told the story of a fast food chain with 1 million job applicants a year, most of whom failed Davies’s center’s work ethic assessment. When offered free work ethic training, only one person out of the hundreds of thousands who failed took them up on the offer.
“We have to integrate it into what people already do” — the internships and apprenticeships and certifications people go through to become technicians or other skilled workers, in other words, Davies said. He urged supervisors and teachers to model these soft skills and talk about them explicitly, pushing their students or employees to do a little better every time.
Soft skills can be as simple as shaking hands and having a genuine conversation when meeting someone for a job interview but are ultimately about selling yourself, said Sidney Moncrief, a retired NBA player and coach who played for the Razorbacks in the 1970s. He and his wife, Takisha, work together to teach social and job skills to children and adults.
Taken together, such skills give the confidence and ability to sell, whether selling a car or selling yourself as the right person for the job you want, Takisha Moncrief said.
“Selling is one of the very few skills that are transferable,” Sidney Moncrief said. “We treat it as a dirty word and we should not.”
The summit is one of a dizzying network of events and programs to help meet Northwest Arkansas’ workforce needs. Multiple public school districts, Northwest Arkansas Community College and Northwest Technical Institute in Springdale work with companies such as Tyson and Northwest Health to offer students hands-on experience that organizers say can move students to the front of the line for hiring.
Hundreds of high school students attended the summit’s career exploration expo Tuesday. Several dozen businesses lined up to explain job options and how the students can start careers with them right after graduating high school. The construction company Flintco, for instance, offers paid internships during college or entry-level laborer positions that can cover the cost of higher education later on, said Brandi Dexter, a Flintco office manager.
Hannah Blackmon, a Bentonville high school senior, hopes to become a neonatal nurse and has already gotten a taste of the job through that district’s Ignite program, shadowing professionals at Northwest. She said she’ll likely start as a certified nursing assistant, which requires the least amount of training, then keep getting more schooling as her career goes on.
“There’s a lot of places you can branch off in nursing,” Blackmon said, which is part of the appeal.
Fellow Bentonville senior Antonio Figueroa, on the other hand, figured he’d go out of state and become a physicist and professor. But talking to the companies Tuesday showed him there are local jobs in engineering or health or food production for someone with his interests in case he ends up staying.
“It actually opened my eyes a lot more,” Figueroa said of the expo.
Chamber CEO Webb and members of the state’s Legislative Task Force on Workforce Education Excellence who attended the summit Wednesday agreed that while schools and businesses are making progress adapting to today’s workforce needs, still more should be done. Companies should devote more resources to partnerships, they said, and teachers should listen to what employers need of new employees, they said. Webb suggested a state tax credit for workforce investments by companies.
“The programs that have developed up here rival anybody’s anywhere,” he said. But he held up two fingers close together and said, “We’ve probably moved the mountain this far.”