Employers: Workers lack adequate training

The Plain Dealer

Columbus

Gov. John Kasich spent the better part of his first year in office focused on job creation.

But some of the success the Republican leader found on that front only highlighted a problem the state has yet to solve.

As more skilled-labor jobs become available, employers complain that too few Ohioans are adequately trained to be hired. That has triggered an odd paradox in a state with an 8.5 percent unemployment rate: open jobs, people searching for work and too few connections.

“We have a mismatch. This is a huge problem,” Kasich told The Plain Dealer last week. “We’ve got people who have jobs, and we’ve got people who they say don’t have the skills to fit the jobs. So we’re not matching them.”

As of Friday, the state says there are 72,341 open positions in Ohio, most in the private sector, which have gone unfilled as employers claim that the labor pool is shallow and unqualified.

Kasich said work-force training — not his highly anticipated midcycle budget or his determination to break through underground shale in eastern Ohio to unearth natural gas and oil — will be his administration’s biggest issue of 2012.

To that end, the governor told The Plain Dealer he is scrapping the old, disjointed approach to training in Ohio and replacing it with a new system that will be run directly from his office using the state’s community colleges as breeding grounds while demanding more cooperation from businesses.

Andy Doehrel, president of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the state’s largest business advocacy group, said that even in this high-tech world, the state still needs blue-collar, manufacturing-skilled workers.

“We are still a manufacturing state, and those skilled trades that you can get from good programs in high school or two-year trade schools, there is a real need out there,” Doehrel said. “Let’s face it, that isn’t as sexy to younger people today who have grown up with phones in their pockets and computers in their cars and on their desks.”

Still, Kasich said business is a big part of the problem.

“What we’re going to try to do is get businesses to forecast in the short term. Like, what do you need next year? What do you need in three years?” Kasich said. “A lot of businesses don’t want to do that.”

State officials said employers are quick to tell the state what type of workers they need for today but terrible about projecting forward. Forecasting is critical, Kasich’s office said, so that students can be encouraged to seek certain career paths on the promise that jobs will be available at the completion of their training.

The governor is quick to point out that the state is a big part of the problem, too. He aims to change that. Ohio has 77 job-training programs spread across 13 state entities and no central strategic plan.