Council Featured in Greenville News

The South Carolina Upstate is facing a looming crisis when it comes to its work force, according to experts who are wondering whether the state has enough skilled people to fill newly created and yet-to-be-created jobs. That question could affect every employer in the region as well as all job candidates and workers. The basic issue is whether the Upstate will have enough workers and enough skilled workers, said Gable Stubbs, an architect with McMillan Smith & Partners Architects PLLC, who is helping to organize a seminar on the subject.

“It’s already beginning,” he said, citing Michelin North America with 50 percent of its work force reaching retirement eligibility in the next five to seven years and General Electric, which is searching for engineers. “They’re scrambling to meet that issue,” an issue that must be addressed quickly by Upstate leaders, parents and interested individuals.

As a seed to get a regional effort under way, Leadership Development, a division of the Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce, is sponsoring with other partners a Work Force Conference at the Carolina First Center on Oct. 2 from 4-7 p.m.

Featured speakers will be Randall Kempner, vice president for regional innovation at the Council on Competitiveness in Washington, and Jim Clinton, executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board. Kempner will discuss competition in the global economy and whether a work force crisis is headed this way. Clinton will analyze the Upstate's work force and provide recommendations for action and innovative initiatives. Hal Johnson, president and chief executive officer of Upstate Alliance, will moderate the discussion.

Becky Godbey, manager of work force development for the Greenville Chamber, said a basic problem is “a large number of Baby Boomers are leaving the workplace. We will still need those skill sets, but we don’t have people in the pipeline. We will have a huge exodus of teachers, a huge exodus of engineers. We have to retool and re-educate because the jobs are different from even 15 years ago.”

Having a large group of employees leave in a competitive market can be a difficult scenario, the experts said. “I would say the global economy creates both great opportunities and great challenges,” Kempner said. The United States can no longer compete on low price. It must depend on its human capital—an educated, well-trained, flexible and creative work force, he said. A region that doesn’t provide this human capital will be unable to successfully compete globally.

“We are no longer competing with North Carolina and Georgia,” Godbey said. “We are competing worldwide.”

“The world is ever more competitive,” Kempner said. “The time has come for a choice to be made.” But “manufacturing in this country is not dead by a long shot,” he said. “What’s hurting in this country is manufacturing workers, not manufacturing companies. They are very productive.” Most of the manufacturing jobs lost have been lost to productivity gains rather than outsourcing, he said. “Workers are no longer there for their muscle. They’re there for their minds,” he said. Clinton said that he considers the problem to be a knowledge crisis rather than a work force crisis. “The value in the world is tied more to what you know and what a company knows,” he said, citing Google as an example.

With that in mind, Stubbs wonders if the Upstate is “preparing our people to be competitive with India or Asia.” Clinton said his organization has concerns about several Southern trends. The South has never quite caught up to the nation as a whole when it comes to educational achievement. Although it has progressed, it has mainly held its own and not improved faster than the nation.

“More troubling,” he said, “is that more countries are moving ahead of the United States in educational achievements.” South Korea is one of those. “In one generation, they’re making a huge difference” in the number of adults with two years of college education, he said. He’s not pessimistic. “The South has responded to economic crises before. When it’s necessary, we have risen to the challenge,” he said.Trends of Pathways to Prosperity, a 2001 study by the Southern Growth Policies Board, said that 65 percent of the jobs of the future in South Carolina would require an associate’s degree or advanced technical training. In 1950, when many of the state’s jobs were relatively low skilled, only 15 percent required more than a high school education.

Stubbs also is concerned about some of these new jobs. “How do you prepare yourself for jobs that have not been invented,” he asked. Kempner said an ideal world would boast of a strong primary education system, starting even before kindergarten. But improving education is a long-term challenge. Short-term solutions also must be found. “They need to better integrate work force development and economic development efforts,” he said, adding that often the two efforts have little communication.

Also, the most at-risk workers—those with low education levels but a good work ethic who have lost their jobs—need special consideration in order not to be left behind, he said. “It requires serious adult learning strategies,” with training centers pursuing these students, having classes for them alone and other methods of lowering the intimidation factor. Also, policy factors could be used to increase life-long learning possibility.

As the Baby Boomers age, the United States needs to figure out a way to use their skills and knowledge, he said. “That is an extraordinary amount of human capital we need to figure out how to leverage,” he said. South Carolina Department of Commerce officials project South Carolina’s work force to grow 30 percent more than the national average in the next few years.

Health care employment is the fastest growing sector, mirroring the overall 30 percent growth rate. Still, the Health Resources and Services Administration predicts that by 2020, the number of nurses will increase by 11 percent—and the demand for the same period is expected to increase by 48 percent. Another major need could be construction workers to build up to five nuclear plants that could come to South Carolina, Godbey said. About 20,000 will be needed, according to estimates, and those workers would include highly skilled and specialized welders and electricians.