Public-private partnerships can close skills gap

PARTNERING TOGETHER: URI President David Dooley, above, facing camera, speaks during a panel discussion at last week’s Employers & Education Summit on how the public and private sectors working together can help better prepare students for the current labor climate. He says R.I. needs more affordable pathways to higher education. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
PARTNERING TOGETHER: URI President David Dooley, above, facing camera, speaks during a panel discussion at last week’s Employers & Education Summit on how the public and private sectors working together can help better prepare students for the current labor climate. He says R.I. needs more affordable pathways to higher education. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

In order to figure out how to solve a problem, you first have to figure out what the solution should look like.
And when you’re talking about closing a skills gap that has been widely cited as a leading cause of Rhode Island’s double-digit unemployment rate, making education an integral part of the state’s economic strategy would be the blueprint to success, according to local educators and business leaders who addressed this and other topics during Providence Business News’ Employers & Education Summit on Nov. 7.
“Is Rhode Island developing a coherent, strategic economic plan? We need one,” said David M. Dooley, president of the University of Rhode Island. “I think Rhode Island is going to struggle with its economy until it addresses more affordable pathways to higher education.”
Dooley was one of five panelists during the second portion of PBN’s summit, held to bring educators and the business community together to address concrete ways of solving a widely acknowledged gap between residents looking for work and available jobs that employers say go unfilled because applicants lack necessary jobs skills.
Dooley’s panel focused on higher education and continuing education’s role in preparing students for careers and life after graduation and addressed an absence of soft, or professional, skills among graduates. The panel also tackled the need to reform post-secondary curriculum to meet new workplace needs, the increasing high cost of post-high school education and training, and a need to attract more students to the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) industries that have been identified as high-paying careers central to developing the state’s burgeoning knowledge economy.
But you can’t fix any of that through education alone, they said.
“We have a jobs gap [too],” said Steve Kitchin, vice president of New England Institute of Technology. “The bottom line is that we need to establish a mechanism in making sure [education] is tied to the economic initiative of where the state is headed.”
In that vein, panelists agreed, state agencies, educational institutions, and businesses need to provide better transparency on what jobs are available and what they will cost students in terms of obtaining degrees and training and then better advise students on the most beneficial options. In addition to Dooley and Kitchin, panelists included Jose-Marie Griffiths, vice president of academic affairs at Bryant University, Tim Hebert, CEO of Atrion Networking Corp., and Charles P. Kelley, executive director of the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority.
Collaborating on making education here more affordable and better directing students toward employing industries, in addition to fostering job growth, the panel said, is the best way to confront what has been dubbed the “brain drain,” or the tendency of Rhode Island college graduates to flee the Ocean State due to a weak job market here.
They said that in a small state where there tends to be a larger-than-average population of lifelong residents, it should be easier than in other parts of the United States and the process, education-wise, should begin way before students are thinking about making career choices.
“Education from kindergarten onward is an economic-development activity. It doesn’t start at graduation” Griffiths said. “We do need to focus on Rhode Island.”
Dooley said a crucial element of making that happen is to reorganize the focus to expand beyond the education system’s responsibility in producing valuable employees.
“The problem is creating new employers, new jobs and opportunities for businesses to grow,” he said. “I think we can succeed.”
But colleges and universities need to do their part in creating job growth, he said, by forming private-public partnerships on the matter and encouraging students and the business community to embrace entrepreneurship.
Rhode Island, he said, could become a “mad man” of creativity and innovation, citing the newly created The Founders League, an incubator to foster entrepreneurial activity formed by Betaspring, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, Brown University and URI after The Rhode Island Foundation’s Make It Happen RI workshop.
“A lot of students fall in love with Rhode Island [and want to stay here],” Dooley said. “[We need to] generate intellectual property. There are success stories out there. We just need to do it.”
Another example of such collaboration, also born out of Make It Happen RI, is BRIdge.jobs, an online internship exchange from the R.I. Student Loan Authority. More successfully promoting and placing students with the right internships is another way to combat the “brain drain” by connecting students with local companies they could work for after graduation.
It also, panelists said, is crucial in providing real-life training, including in soft skills, that graduates need to get hired.
Those skills can include the ability to work with others, the ability to act in a professional manner, to write a document that will reach a wide audience, and the ability to recognize and solicit perspectives other than their own.
One feeling on the apparently new shortage of these skills is that schools, and probably parents, have focused too long now on developing technical skills and have let other career-readiness training fall by the wayside.
The other feeling is that employers traditionally also have put too much emphasis on a candidate’s technical qualifications.
“We have many positions where we will go a year before finding the right candidate. We don’t have a lack of applications but we are missing something,” Hebert said. “We [needed] to find a way to fill positions faster.”
To help combat the problem, Atrion created an apprenticeship program that trains current employees in things such as communication and presentation skills. While their internship program, Hebert said, costs the company little more than a time investment, the apprenticeship program, which has “graduated” 30 employees thus far, costs approximately $300,000 per year.
“It’s very expensive. We hope the long-term payoff is that we have a very loyal and competent staff,” Hebert said. “There’s something missing in providing career guidance to our students. English majors get out of college and realize most companies aren’t going to pay them to read. We need to provide better counseling.”
Kitchin said businesses and educators also need to be better at informing students about what industries are hiring. Again, he said, that initiative needs to start at the elementary-school level.
“We do believe part of the dilemma is that supply-and-demand side,” Kitchin said. •

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