Building a career, five weeks at a time: a way to navigate Pittsburgh’s job market
The graduation ceremony unfolded, complete with speeches from alumni, praise from instructors and classmates, proud family members holding up cell phones to capture the moment. One graduate sobbed in her chair, overcome with emotion.
When names were called, the certificates handed out were not college degrees costing thousands of dollars. Rather, they reflected five weeks of job training at no cost for the 28 people at the Energy Innovation Center in the Lower Hill.
Within days, UPMC, which had provided funding for the training program, offered each graduate a job as an environmental service technician — employees who will earn $15 an hour by 2021 to sanitize hospitals throughout the Pittsburgh health care giant’s network.
The program is part of a sea change in how people build careers in Pittsburgh at a moment when the jobs market is rapidly evolving
Employers, colleges and workforce officials are turning to micro-credentials to help workers advance in labor market
and unemployment has fallen to historic lows. As the clout of a college degree has eroded amid soaring tuition, ballooning student debt and sometimes disappointing job prospects, a simple solution has gained steam.
Degree programs are being broken into bite-size chunks — building blocks that workers can stack based on the demands of a given job. These building blocks can help employers fill positions with high turnover and allow educators to provide lower-cost courses more closely linked with open jobs.
Micro-credentials, as they’re sometimes called, take aim at a looming workforce shortage by providing quick primers on a particular skill or occupation. Microcre dentials could be a way to solve the “skills gap” — a buzzword spanning industries like manufacturing, utilities, auto body shops and aeronautics.
The trend is making headway beyond blue-collar trades like construction and oil and gas and reaching into health care, business, software development and cybersecurity.
Online job advertisements targeting the Pittsburgh region nearly doubled in 2018, listing a wide range of skills like cleaning, maintenance, repair, budgeting and accounting in high demand.
Although businesses complain they can’t find workers, policymakers put part of the blame on employers’ reluctance to soften expectations and invest in job training.
Last year, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development found Pittsburgh-area employers by and large had failed to implement internships, invest in on-the-job training or adjust job requirements. The report followed a 2016 report that projected an 80,000-worker shortfall in the region as older workers retire and younger people move out of the region.
That is reflected in the job ads, which tend to offer low pay but ask for high educational attainment. In December, nearly half of the 20,000 advertised positions paid less than $35,000, and 63 percent asked for a bachelor’s degree or more, according to data published by Partner4Work, the workforce development agency for Allegheny County.
Micro-credentials could be a way for employers to invest in training and education, said Bill Valenta, assistant dean for MBA and executive programs at the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business.
After the 2008 recession, employers pulled back on tuition reimbursement as a perk for employees to further their education, said Mr. Valenta, who believes that benefit will reappear as businesses compete for workers.
“Companies are going to have to reintroduce educational opportunities for their team members as a retention strategy,” he said. “Our role is to get ahead of that curve and build the programs.”
Playing a bigger role
Last fall, the business school launched Pitt’s first micro-credential program, offering nine-credit certificates in accounting, finance, data programming for business insights, digital innovation, and innovation and entrepreneurship. About 25 students have gone through the program.
The program serves students “not willing to dive headfirst” into a full master’s program, Mr. Valenta said, because of cost, time commitments and barriers like the Graduate Management Admission Test and Graduate Record Examinations.
With a micro-credential in hand, students who want to continue graduate courses can ask the business school to waive the entrance exams, Mr. Valenta said.
Micro-credentials are playing a broader role than in years past, when they were created to meet often temporary demand from one industry.
During the natural gas fracking boom, energy companies needed to train an entire workforce for the drilling rigs. In 2010, Westmoreland County Community College partnered with the Pennsylvania College of Technology to launch the ShaleNet program — threeweek courses that grew to train more than 1,200 students over more than four years.
At the Community College of Allegheny County, adults looking to build skills or switch careers are the focus. CCAC drew up a micro-credential program with a nearly $500,000 grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2016.
“When working with adults, they often seek short-term training to quickly gain viable employment, while a degree may be something they are working toward in the future,” said Deb Killmeyer, assistant vice president and dean of workforce development at CCAC.
“This is a way for them to get something sooner, to break it into manageable pieces,” she said.
CCAC launched three offerings: a six-week nursing aide course, a four-month information technology program course and a sixmonth health information technology course.
Over the last three years, 139 students completed the courses, which were offered free with the grant. The college is still gathering data on the program, which ended in December, but the majority of students went directly into a job, Ms. Killmeyer said.
The college continues to offer the IT course, which costs about $1,800, and the nursing aide course, which costs about $1,300. It hopes to offer the health IT course soon.
The curriculum was put together with input from employers, Ms. Killmeyer said. In the health care information technology program, one adjunct professor worked at the VA medical center and another worked at UPMC. Students “were getting firsthand information about what’s going on in those fields,” Ms. Killmeyer said.
An ‘essential service’
At the Energy Innovation Center, the hospital cleaners’ program targets people who are typically overlooked for jobs.
Many students described months of problems getting an interview — even with UPMC, the sponsor of the training and largest private employer in the region.
Meanwhile, low staffing levels and high turnover among cleaners had threatened to hamper operations at some hospitals, said John P. Krolicki, vice president of UPMC’s facilities and support services. One hospital had as many as 45 openings, he said, crimping the “essential service” of sanitizing rooms and controlling the spread of disease.
That mismatch led to UPMC working with the Energy Innovation Center to create the five-week curriculum. Inside the former Connelley Trade School, cleaners train in a simulated hospital wing to learn a surprisingly technical skill.
The simulator has an operating room, a patient room and bathroom, a cleaning closet filled with carts, and a station that dispenses and mixes powerful cleaning products — giving the area the distinct sanitized smell of a hospital.
Nearly 200 people have completed the program since it launched in 2017, according to the Energy Innovation Center. The program boasts a graduation rate of 96 percent, and virtually everyone who has graduated now works at UPMC, the numbers showed.
Many in December’s graduating class were due at work the following morning.
The Pittsburgh health system offers tuition reimbursement to all its employees with a clearer path to promotions, Mr. Krolicki said after the graduation ceremony.
“Our vacancy rate was so high, so we’ve been able to drop that,” he said.