Skills coalition launching with big goals
Photo | Grant Welker
Worcester City Hall
A new business coalition launching Wednesday plans to pursue a suite of policies aimed at helping workers foster the skills that employers seek.
The effort got its start in 2019 when the national group Business Leaders United approached the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce about applying for a grant to form a statewide coalition that would promote skills-development policies in Massachusetts.
James Sutherland, the Boston Chamber's director of policy and research, said his organization then brought together about 10 other business groups to "dive into data and research on skills gaps in Massachusetts" and look for ways to address those gaps.
The Massachusetts Business Coalition on Skills now consists of 22 members -- along with several local and regional chambers of commerce, it includes the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, Amplify Latinx, the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, Kendall Square Association, Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council.
"The overarching goal at the start of this was really how do we better align our training offerings with what employers are looking for," Sutherland told the News Service. "It's become increasingly difficult, before the pandemic, to find the talent with the skills that employers wanted, and then now, as we go through the pandemic and the ramifications of that, there's just a ton of opportunity for individuals to kind of reassess where they are in their careers and think about what skills they need to be successful or to really thrive in the workforce."
The launch comes as businesses and policymakers are trying to envision what the Massachusetts economy will look like on the other side of a pandemic that initially sent unemployment rates skyrocketing and has disrupted many business sectors and work habits.
Among the coalition's shorter-term goals, Sutherland said, are boosting capacity at vocational technical schools -- in part by expanding the footprint of school buildings and looking for new ways to bring more teachers into the field -- and developing a "statewide employer-driven essential skills standard" to ensure students are equipped with workplace skills like collaboration and work ethic.
"Probably one of the biggest pain points I hear from employers when they're looking for talent is, they can teach the technical, the hard skills, but they can't teach someone to be on time, they can't teach teamwork," Sutherland said.
Other items on the coalition's policy agenda include using matching grants and tax credits to incentivize employer training initiatives; collecting data to set regional and statewide training goals; encouraging employers to explore new methods of hiring and skills identification; and mapping out the different state, federal and local funding sources and programs that make up the current workforce development system, with an eye towards simplifying it.
Sutherland said the coalition will also focus on "embedding equity....into whatever our new talent development system looks like."
"The only way that we're going to emerge from this pandemic sort of in a good place is if everyone is able to get back to work and they're able to reenter or move into jobs that are fulfilling, high-paying, growth industries," he said.
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