Our Next 75: Preparing tomorrow's workforce today

Our Next 75: Preparing tomorrow's workforce today

by Julia Mericle – Reporter, Pittsburgh Business Times

How will Pittsburgh’s workforce evolve over the next 75 years?

Will the days of four years of college education followed by crippling amounts of debt go away? Will workers continue to shift away from lifelong careers at single companies, jumping more often between jobs and requiring near-constant retraining as technology continues to rapidly forge ahead?

And is it true that many of the jobs that future generations of workers will hold don’t exist today?

All of these are distinct possibilities, according to Pittsburgh technology and workforce development experts who weighed in on what the region needs to do to ensure that people are prepared for the workforce of tomorrow.

As part of its Our Next 75 initiative, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development reached out to the Pittsburgh region to help identify strategies that could contribute to the region’s vitality in the years to come. The strategy that rose to the top in the thriving people category was the need for people in the region to have “multiple and affordable pathways to in-demand careers.”

In its most recent Inflection Point 2017-18 report, the Allegheny Conference found that Pittsburgh is on track to reach a potential worker shortage of about 80,000 people by 2025. That’s based on baby boomer retirements, modest job growth and a talent pipeline that does not meet demand.

The report illustrated a Pittsburgh job ecosystem where about half of the annual 40,000 students who graduate from local colleges and universities leave the region. It noted that despite the group of high-wage, highly skilled workers Pittsburgh boasts, it also has a large group of occupations with average wages of less than $15 an hour and few upward mobility pathways. And it also pointed out that Pittsburgh has one of the least diverse workforces compared to its benchmark regions, with demographics that show African-Americans with lower education levels, lower median yearly earnings and higher levels of unemployment across the 10-county area.
 
 Pair all that with the fact that Forbes reported student loan debt reached its highest point in 2019 — 45 million borrowers in the U.S., who collectively owe more than $1.5 trillion, or, on average, $28,650 individually.

What’s needed, experts say, is more training programs that have a direct entrance to jobs and a faster training model to ensure workers can keep up with the most in-demand skills — without racking up thousands of dollars in debt.

A defined pathway to a job

Earl Buford, CEO of Partner4Work, said the workforce development organization has developed several advisory councils made up of employers and industries to develop initiatives, recruitment strategies and training programs to build reliable pathways to in-demand careers. It’s an infrastructure model he said will allow Partner4Work to be responsive to what is needed at the time.   

Buford said he expects those needs to revolve heavily around robotics and the need for technicians to operate the systems. But no matter what the jobs of the future hold, Buford believes the education and training systems in place now must evolve to ensure that individuals who complete a program are rewarded at the end with either a job or a defined pathway to a job. He especially wants to see this available for high schoolers pregraduation and for those who are in jail prerelease. 

Pittsburgh has done a good job of designing training programs, but has not connected the dots for those who complete the programs for what comes afterwards, he added.  

“We need almost like an information clearinghouse approach to make sure our job seekers understand what is out there,” he said. 

One industry that is working hard to get workers directly into in-demand jobs — and perhaps could help serve as a model for other industries seeking to fill in-demand jobs that don’t require a traditional four-year college degree — is construction.

Jeff Nobers, executive director of the Builders Guild of Western Pennsylvania, said the Builders Guild recently completed its first year operating a pre-apprenticeship program previously run by the Energy Innovation Center to prepare people for building and construction trades.  

The organization worked with Partner4Work to create a funding system that would allow the classes to get up and running on a consistent basis, and this year the program saw 75 students. Nobers said in 2020 he hopes to run five, rather than four, rounds of the classes and graduate about 125 people. 

Of those who completed the program, about a quarter were unemployed when they started. About 90 percent of graduates from the pre-apprenticeship program are African-American. 

“The real intent is to help build the diversity of both minorities and females in the construction industry,” Nobers said.

Several other pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs, including those run by New Century Careers and University of Pittsburgh’s Manufacturing Assistance Center (MAC), have popped up or expanded offerings. And Literacy Pittsburgh launched its “Ready and Relevant” initiative in August to invest more than $1 million in training the 14,000 adults in the Pittsburgh region with at least a ninth-grade education but no high school diploma for in-demand careers. 

“We talk a lot about workers, and that is critically important, but those workers also have families and they need jobs and health care,” said Michelle Figlar, vice president of learning for The Heinz Endowments and a member of Literacy Pittsburgh’s Transition Committee to launch the Ready and Relevant initiative and transition Carey Harris into her new role as CEO of Literacy Pittsburgh, at a kick-off event for the initiative. “An investment in people holistically is one that is going to help our kids and families in this region flourish. This (is an) opportunity to really invest in an ecosystem where we are all reaching for the same north star.” 

A faster training model 

Another key component to this investment in people is ensuring that even after the initial education and training is done, workers are able to get the training needed that will prepare them as workforce needs evolve over the course of their careers.

“The need for new knowledge will be constant in the life of technology and non-technology professionals alike,” said Justin Driscoll, campus director of Tech Elevator Pittsburgh. “Therefore, the ability to quickly learn new skills will be the norm for the workforce of the future.”  

That’s the goal of Tech Elevator and other similar bootcamp-style training programs throughout the city, which aim to fast-track people into the tech careers employers are scrambling for talent in. Tech Elevator teaches participants software development and coding skills in a three-month program that costs a fraction of a traditional four-year computer science degree.

However, Driscoll expects that this model will be outdated soon, replaced by something faster and more flowing.  

“The bootcamps and training programs of today will be remembered as solutions for a slower way of life, but will also be the model that was used to create the bootcamps for the 22nd century,” Driscoll said. 

The Allegheny Conference’s Inflection Point report also reiterated this need for continuous, high-speed training, saying that some autonomous vehicle companies cited “the desire and aptitude to learn a new, high-level skill — on the order of coding — every day, just to keep pace” as a top attribute of job candidates. In order to achieve this lofty goal, the Conference suggested that Pittsburgh companies need to reconsider the high level of credentials and years of experience many are still requiring in certain job postings.

Speed and continuous education also will lead people to work in more and more jobs throughout their careers, predicts Audrey Russo, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council. 

“I think that people 75 years from now won’t work 40 hours a week,” she said. “I think we will see people mutate from one role to the next, and the gig economy will change how corporations exist.” 

The workers of the future

The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, a research institute based out of Mill 19, aims to prepare Pittsburgh for the jobs it expects to be widely available in 75 years, which will likely include basic programming, mechanics and electricity skills. 

ARM, a member of Manufacturing USA, is one of several regional institutes working to establish future manufacturing work in the U.S. It routinely provides funding to various workforce development programs and projects in the area, with a strong focus on introducing young students to careers in advanced manufacturing.

“It’s the kind of training you can get in trade schools and community colleges for not a very big financial or time investment, but not something you are going to likely come out of high school with,” Jay Douglass, COO at ARM, said. 

Paying attention to the young students that will make up the workforce decades from now is vital, and something the Conference found is under-recognized in surveys for the Inflection Point report. The report showed that fewer than 10 percent of employers even considered engaging with K-12 students to build up the talent pipeline, and less than half offer internships to college students.

Douglass sees paid apprenticeships starting to gain popularity as a way to get workers into these needed fields affordably, including several programs that ARM invested in, such as the Robotics Technician Apprenticeship Program in partnership with Catalyst Connection. 

While Pittsburgh has gained a reputation as a city of innovation and technology, Douglass said it should not feel secure in that until it’s doing everything it can to ensure a talent pipeline to fill the workforce of the future.

“That’s been the way Pittsburgh is. We go through our ups and downs, and right now we’re on an up again,” Douglass said. “People need to continue to embrace the technology.”