Paul Bass Photo
Marcia LaFemina, Yolanda Caldera-Durant, Ann Harrison at WNHH FM.
Some 86,000 jobs are going begging in Connecticut, many of them paying a living wage and not requiring a college degree. Thousands of people without college degrees need those jobs. So put those people in the jobs — simple, right?
Not so simple.
That’s what the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (CFGNH) learned. It held 40 “listening sessions” with employers and job-seekers and training agencies, crunched the numbers and produced an 87-page report about what’s actually a “mismatch” — and how to fix it.
The report is called Labor Market Study of Greater New Haven and the Valley. It showed that too often people who seem right for those jobs don’t find out about them, or don’t land in the right training programs, or don’t end up moving into the jobs or keeping them, due to child-care or transportation barriers.
Despite all the necessary efforts at reaching people over social media and through official channels, “it’s still who you know, how you hear about jobs, who you trust,” Ann Harrison concluded after reading the report. Click here to read the report.
Harrison discussed the report’s findings and steps forward along with CFGNH Vice-President Yolanda Caldera-Durant, who took the lead on the project, and employer and trainer Marcia LaFemina, on an episode of WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
Harrison serves as chief strategy officer at the Workforce Alliance, the long-distance runner in the region’s job-training field. The report reinforced to her the need to develop and maintain contacts with influencers like clergy and other community figures, to offer paid training for people who need stipends to afford training for light-manufacturing or health care jobs (which abound right now), and to continually develop new community contacts.
Caldera-Durant also spoke of the need to strengthen links between employers and training programs.
LaFemina is on both ends of that relationship: She runs a streetlight-manufacturing facility that hires some of the people the report is concerned with. She also is in the process of ramping up a new-generation training facility on Mill Street in New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood. Called MATCH (Manufacturing And Technical Community Hub), it trains people on the equipment they’ll use in jobs currently available in regional factories, and is developing a track for women who need to work 25-hour weeks in order to take care of kids outside their school hours.
Click on the above video to watch the full discussion with Yolanda Caldera-Durant, Marcia LaFemina, and Ann Harrison on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.
This is why we need a national sliding scale fee educational program for skilled trades and vocational jobs training for high school graduates, and adults who are laid off, or would like to try a new career, or who quit their previous jobs, and prison reentry to society folks, and others to get training, retraining, apprenticeships and access to a national job placement database with the employers of today and the foreseeable future who have jobs that will go begging for employees with the right training. Our high school students should be introduced to the various trades and vocations and what they entail throughout their high school education as a viable alternative to an academic traditional four year or more college degree.
This would improve our economy, better match employers needs with appropriately trained employees, reduce the numbers of people not earning a living wage and dependent on public assistance, and reduce crime, and keep employers from moving overseas to find employees, and reduce supply chain disruptions, and so many more beneficial impacts to society.