Workforce equity, filling jobs focus of conference
Educators, government officials and local business people came together Tuesday in downtown Bakersfield to find ways Kern industry can meet its demand for a ready labor force with workers more reflective of the county’s diverse communities.
The seven-hour conference cohosted by the Kern Community College District, “Good Jobs with Equity: The Future Workforce,” explored challenges and opportunities associated with making Kern a model for worker training as California tries to transition to a more environmentally sustainable economy while also ramping up workforce development in high-demand careers like health care.
The event’s highest-profile speaker, California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Oakley, set an urgent tone early on by tying the state’s future success in building an equitable workforce to Kern’s nascent efforts to train students and existing workers in areas like clean energy development.
“We feel very clearly and very passionately that California cannot be successful if communities like Kern and communities up and down the San Joaquin Valley are not successful,” Oakley told an audience of hundreds at the Bakersfield Marriott at the Convention Center.
He and others said it’ll be important, as the pandemic winds down, to create new and, likely, unconventional job pathways that bring together universities, community colleges, business philanthropy and community organizations.
“There should be a little bit of fear in our guts right now about what’s going to happen,” Oakley said. “If we don’t get it right this time, I fear for where we’re going to be in five years.”
Mention was made of
California’s Community Economic Resilience Fund, adopted last year for creation of 13 regional plans for making strategic investments in economic development. Kern, considered a top contender for millions of dollars in CERF money, has outlined plans for spending its money on workforce development initiatives along with industry investments that would capitalize on the county’s existing strengths.
The undersecretary of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency, Stewart Knox, said he was aware the county is very interested in receiving CERF money, “and we are very interested in Kern” being able to tap that resource.
Knox added that there also needs to be, possibly separately, a large investment in health care workforce development. Later in the meeting, another speaker made clear how important a priority that need is locally.
Daniel Wolcott, president of Adventist Health’s Kern County Network, told of the stress the local health care industry has been through during the pandemic. In addition to a shortage of workers overall, he said, the industry struggles to hire health care professionals who reflect the ethnic and racial composition of the community.
He called on local employers to work more closely and directly with academic partners to build new career pathways for students. Some ideas he brought up involved turning some existing local workers into educators, and making clinical placement an aroundthe-clock opportunity not limited to normal business hours.
“Employers need to step up to the table,” Wolcott said.
Another focus of discussion Tuesday was entrepreneurship as a cross-disciplinary field of teaching that can help address poverty in rural areas.
Victor Parker, deputy associate administrator at the U.S. Small Business Administration, said bringing greater local visibility to entrepreneurship can help drive equity in rural areas, almost regardless of the industry where it’s applied. He noted that equity can also be improved by emphasizing opportunities local rural areas have with regard to government contracting.
Internships and apprenticeships also came up Tuesday as local workforce development tools. President and CEO Richard Chapman of the Kern Economic Development Corp. said internships are a key factor in upward mobility. He pointed to an internships program about to launch locally that’s expected to open new lines of communication between employers and workers being trained for such jobs.