State and Regional Roles in Engaging Industry Leaders

The State Role in Engaging Industry Leaders

Most engagement of business and industry occurs at the regional level, but there are several important benefits to engagement of state-level industry leadership.

Engaging state level partners with private industry

State level industry associations (such as state Chambers of Commerce, Manufacturers Associations, SHRM, Hospital Associations, or Associations of General Contractors, amongst others) can work directly with the State Workforce Investment Board, the State Economic Development Agency, the community and technical college system, K-12 education, Adult Education, and organized labor to develop a "strategic framework" that regional sector partners can use to guide their sector initiatives. In Oklahoma, the Governor’s Workforce Development Council has engaged industry experts from three priority industries on an on-going basis to help guide their sector strategy policies. Oklahoma used a healthcare expert to assist in developing a strategy for the healthcare industry. Minnesota has hired industry workforce specialists who work closely with a statewide network of partners in creating innovative solutions to meet the recruitment, training, and retention needs of businesses in the healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing sectors.

Acting as champions of sector strategies

State level business and industry leaders can also promote the benefits of the sector approach to their peers, members and constituents at the regional level. Their statewide reach through meetings and conferences, newsletters, and web-based communications can be invaluable in promoting the sector partnership model to key industry leaders at regional levels. The business community and labor leaders can also be influential with new governors and state legislators establishing priorities for their new administration or term. For example, when the Pennsylvania legislature was considering eliminating funding for sector strategies, the business community successfully convinced the legislature that the funding was critical to the state’s economic competitiveness.

Identifying workforce needs

If recruited and engaged pro-actively, state-level business and industry leaders can help the public partners better understand the strengths, challenges and needs of potential target industry sectors, particularly related to a skilled workforce. A distinct advantage of regional sector initiatives is their ability to conduct detailed, on-the-ground workforce needs analyses, but state level business partners can often identify the core skills that are needed industry wide. Some of this data already exists inside the industry. When pulled and analyzed (which the state can do), this data can be key to guiding the development of regional and statewide solutions to industry workforce needs. Oklahoma engaged industry leaders at the state level in the healthcare, aerospace and manufacturing sectors to develop recommendations to address the workforce challenges of their respective industries. Both Colorado (The WELLS Center) and Oklahoma (The Oklahoma Health Care Workforce Center) have established non-profit health care organizations focused on the training needs of the health care industry and lead by leaders in the health care sector.

Identifying opportunities and barriers

State level business associations can help the state level public partners identify the legislative, public policy, and practice opportunities and barriers that either facilitate or hinder an industry’s ability to be competitive. This might include such things as state training incentives, regulatory and tax policies, and education policies.

Political advocacy

State Chambers of Commerce and business associations can be critical allies in advocating funding for sector strategies with state legislatures. Individual business leaders can also play a crucial role in working with state legislatures to support the development (or eliminate the barriers or disincentives) of sector strategies.

Active engagement in state level sector task forces

Many states use labor market analysis to identify the industry clusters/sectors that make up a significant proportion of employment and good jobs across their regions, such as healthcare or transportation and logistics. Some states convene taskforces of business leadership, legislators, state workforce boards, education, labor and others to identify and solve the workforce challenges of the priority industry sector. When this happens in parallel with regional sector initiatives focusing on the same industry, state-level activity can bolster both regional and statewide solutions.

The Regional Role in Engaging Industry Leaders

At the regional level, business leaders in the target industry play the on-the-ground role of driving the development, deployment and on-going oversight of regional sector initiatives. A key criteria for success of regional sector partnerships is the role of an "intermediary" that convenes public and private stakeholders around the needs of employers in the target industry. The intermediary facilitates the development and activities of the partnership, but must be careful not to chart the course of the partnership. That is the explicit role of employer members. Some of the specific roles of the sector business leaders at the regional level include:

• Providing leadership to the partnership to ensure that it is industry driven
• Being engaged from the very beginning of the sector initiative
• Assisting the partnership to identify the underlying “core” workforce issues that need to be addressed
• Identifying and articulating specific skills needs of their industry
• Making financial and/or in-kind contributions to the sector initiative
• Advocating to other businesses in the industry and region to get involved in the partnership