Bump Leaves Agency To Pursue Auditor Campaign
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Nancy Snyder, former president and CEO of Commonwealth Corp., was recently named interim secretary of the Massachusetts Office of Labor and Workforce Development.
The Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development recently saw a changing of the guard, as Secretary Suzanne Bump stepped down from her position last week to focus on a campaign to run for the state auditor’s office.
Gov. Deval Patrick named Nancy Snyder, the president and CEO of Commonwealth Corp., as the interim-secretary. Common-wealth Corp. is a quasi-public agency that falls under the Office of Labor and Workforce Development and focuses on connecting education with workforce programs.
“This is a pretty seamless transition,” Snyder said, explaining that she’s worked closely with former Secretary Bump for the last two and a half years and has 12 years of prior experience at the Boston Private Industry Council. “These are obviously very challenging times in terms of the economy and the workers that are unemployed, so I wouldn’t say that this is a job without challenges. It would be more challenging if I was not familiar with the issues or the people.”
While she’s familiar with the issues, Snyder’s new position will allow her to have a hand in more than just workforce development, as was the case when she was at Commonwealth Corp. In her new role she’ll be managing unemployment insurance, occupational safety and labor relations, among others. And while she thinks it unlikely that she would implement any new initiatives, she says her new role is far from that of a caretaker.
“There aren’t many brand new initiatives that we would start, but there’s a lot of work that’s underway that we have to continue to do well,” she said.
Bump announced her resignation days after State Auditor Joseph DeNucci announced that he would not be seeking reelection. Her announcement was a bit of a reversal from a statement she made months earlier that she was going to focus on her job with Labor and Workforce Development and not pursue a campaign.
"Earlier this year I felt that I couldn’t make that break,” she said. But she added that DeNucci’s announcement made her realize that she could “continue this kind of work on a larger scale.”
Bump said her biggest accomplishment at the Office of Labor and Workforce Development was aligning the agency.
“When I arrived here, the whole system of workforce development really didn’t even merit being called a system because it was so fragmented and lacking in strategic direction and accountability,” she said.
With three distinct players involved in workforce development — the state, regional workforce boards and separately managed career centers — Bump said she made it her priority to align those divisions and develop a cohesive game plan.
“It was all about taking a system that was broken and breathing new life into it,” she said.
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