Beyond the ‘Inflection Point’: activities to persuade young people to stay in Pittsburgh
She helped spread the message in meetings with more than 5,000 business leaders, government officials and educators in the summer of 2016: The Pittsburgh region was facing a shortfall of 80,000 workers in the next decade — driven by retirements and by young people moving away.
Since then, Linda Topoleski, vice president for workforce operations and programs at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, has been working behind the scenes to shore up that expected shortfall.
The latest efforts? Everything from redesigning college courses to planning outdoor yoga events.
“Everyone owns this issue,” Ms. Topoleski said in an interview in the conference’s 17th-floor offices in Downtown. The 75-year-old organization, tasked with improving the 10-county region’s economy, is now expecting results from its 2016 report, called “Inflection Point.”
In the last three years, results have been mixed, the conference has acknowledged.
A January 2018 follow-up to the original report found that Pittsburgh-area employers by and large had failed to implement internships, invest in on-the-job training or adjust job requirements.
Just 10 percent of those surveyed had reached into K-12 schools to explain to guidance counselors and teachers exactly what they do, the conference found, and about half did not have an internship program.
“One of the surprises for us was how quickly higher ed reacted” to the report, changing majors and drawing up micro-credentials, Ms. Topoleski said.
Although slower to act, “Businesses have really started to collaborate a bit more,” she said.
One way to bring everyone together, she said, is embodied in a huge marketing effort underway to get — and keep — young people interested in Pittsburgh.
Each fall, about 140,000 students arrive at college campuses in the region, and about half of them leave the region after they’re done with school, she said.
This summer, the Allegheny Conference will coordinate a series of free events for interns in the city. A couple of dozen companies with more than 750 interns have already signed on to participate in the program, billed “Pittsburgh Passport.”
Sleek flyers advertise a kickoff party at Heinz Field, outdoor yoga, kayaking on the rivers — events that the conference wants students to share on social media platforms tied together by the hashtag #LOVEPGH.
For the last two weeks of July, interns will have the chance to leave their companies and join another one to continue their internships for a two-week period. It’s an opportunity for them to test out another line of work, Ms. Topoleski said.
“What we realized was, we had gotten away from selling ourselves to students,” she said. “There’s a lot of fun free stuff so they can really immerse themselves in Pittsburgh.”
For the first time, she said, “We’re trying to create a unified brand for Pittsburgh.”