Initiative aims to match employers, job-searchers

Top state agency executives are engineering a longterm solution to upend the chronic labor shortages that have been a thorn for employers hiring in Arkansas over the past few years.

The initiative, scheduled to begin this fall and that could take up to five years to implement, will overhaul how the state invests in and supports workforce training.

It’s a direct approach: create a data-rich online portal that matches the skills, talents and preferences of job seekers with the positions, training and development opportunities offered by employers.

A key goal of the program is keeping students in the state to build high-paying careers. The scope of the effort is unprecedented and could place Arkansas at the forefront as a national leader in workforce development.

Mike Rogers, the state’s first-ever chief workforce officer, is leading the effort along with the heads of six state agencies ranging from the departments of Commerce to Corrections. Gov. Sarah Sanders established the workforce Cabinet through an executive order in February and agency heads met a week later to begin the process.

To keep it simple, Rogers

says the career-matchmaking program, so far unnamed, is like combining a dating site such as eharmony with employment services such as Indeed.

“We want to build a welcoming relationship with employers and employees,” said Rogers, a former vo-tech teacher who led nationwide workforce training at Tyson Foods before his current role. “Both have to be attracted to each other, both have to want the same outcomes, and both have to be willing to work together. We have an opportunity here to map out the whole infrastructure of workforce development.”

The job-training program will pivot to a new emphasis on how to evaluate the success of career development, flipping from an emphasis on a college degree to a priority on skills development and job training.

‘DIGITAL TWIN’

Job seekers will build a personal profile — Rogers calls it a “digital twin” — on the data-driven web portal, which also will include employment opportunities at companies in the state as well as training and apprenticeship programs, giving workers multiple roads to pursue a career.

“We want to let people know their options and give them the tools to connect,” Rogers said. “We want to maximize exposure to the resources that are out there in an easy-to-find location so job seekers can find the right employer and employers can find the most-qualified job candidates.”

The initiative will establish key performance indicators and return on investment (ROI) — metrics that well-run businesses rely on every day — to assess the program’s effectiveness. The goal is to enhance Arkansans’ ability to develop careers that add value beyond the investments to train and educate the job seeker.

“We eventually need to get to a dashboard that works for everyone and a way for employers to evaluate key metrics quickly and easily,” Rogers said. “We need to identify outcomes and we want to know our ROI. This system needs to measure performance so we know when we’re successful and we can improve how we invest our money.”

National job training and development officials are monitoring the state’s progress.

NATIONAL NOTICE

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation reports that Arkansas has the potential to be a national leader in career training and programming that pairs job seekers with employers.

“Arkansas has been leaning into a number of programs that our foundation houses and continues to up their game in terms of level of involvement,” said Jason Tyszko, senior vice president in charge of programming at the foundation, a nonprofit that develops workforce training and development programs through the nation’s largest business organization.

“Arkansas is at the tip of the spear right now in looking at how to modernize their workforce data and build a whole new set of services on top of it,” he added.

Sanders’ executive order called for creating “a single entity to coordinate and to assist in career and technical

education, which in turn, will ensure that young adults who are entering the workforce are prepared for high-wage, high-growth careers.”

That work has been spread across six state agencies and the chief executives at each of those — the departments of Commerce, Corrections, Education, Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and Labor and Licensing — are now members of the workforce Cabinet.

Fundamentally, the group’s task is to build a talent pipeline that places workers in jobs that best suit their needs and gives employers a reliable network of employees to support business growth. Rather than flooding the market with resumes, job seekers will pursue specific openings they have the experience and skills to fill.

“This will give us an edge when we’re competing with surrounding states for jobs,” said Randy Henderson, a member of the state Board of Education and Workforce Services Development Board who also is a Nucor Steel veteran involved in promoting job training and workforce development for the manufacturer. “This will create a clear, defined approach to what our workforce

needs are.”

WORKER SHORTAGE

One of Arkansas’ greatest economic challenges over the past few three years, since the beginning of the pandemic, has been developing a plentiful pipeline of workers ready to step into a job and perform well. Labor force participation has been below historic norms and behind national averages.

The Arkansas labor market is tighter than in the U.S. overall, according to an April economic analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank. At the end of 2022, Arkansas’ labor demand exceeded labor supply by 3.3%, an indication that there were roughly 103 job openings for every 100 workers in the labor force. By comparison, the U.S. overall was at 2.9% at year’s end.

A separate analysis conducted by Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Arkansas Economic Development Institute, found that there were 2.5 job openings in Arkansas for every person who is unemployed. That compares with 1.5 job openings in the nation.

In May, Arkansas reached an all-time unemployment rate low of 2.7% and established another record for

the number of employed Arkansans: nonfarm payroll reached more than 1.36 million jobs. Another sign more Arkansans are finding jobs: The number of unemployed Arkansans has dropped by 9,500 in the past four months. Yet there are more than 89,000 jobs open in the state, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Jobs are available; trained workers are scarce.

“The shortage of skilled, prepared people is not going to get better anytime soon,” said Randy Zook, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce. “We’re going to have to sustain the effort for a long time to meet the demands of just replacing the workforce as it retires. And to accommodate any kind of growth, we’ve got to step on the gas.”

Employers and educators are more aware that it’s essential for business growth and employee development to collaborate in creating training programs and curricula that provide careers for Arkansans right out of high school.

“Companies are realizing there’s a great skills gap with an aging workforce and they’re trying to leverage

two-year community colleges and others to build the programs they need,” said Cody Waits, director of the Arkansas Office of Skills Development. “Businesses are feeling the pressure of finding workers – they have the work and can create the jobs; they just don’t have the people.”

Success of the program requires teamwork among employers, state agencies, local and county governments, K-12 educators, vocational-technical schools and the state’s colleges and universities. Rogers is charged with forging those partnerships to build a sustainable workforce-readiness program that provides a steady supply of workers across multiple industries.

“You have to get all the disparate organizations to have all the oars in the water and rowing in the same direction to meet the market demands,” said Commerce Secretary Hugh Mcdonald, a member of the workforce cabinet.

Since his appointment in February, Rogers has been on a tour of Arkansas — visiting more than 100 business, schools and training programs — to promote the initiative and gain buy-in from key stakeholders.

SEPTEMBER START-UP

The initiative will roll out in stages with the initial version, primarily focused on state government jobs, planned for launch in September. The first year will focus on marketing and promoting the program as the portal adds more data. Each iteration will add more features and details to build a robust architecture, an effort that will take up to five years to fully develop and deploy.

“We’ll get to the point where when a company wants to grow, we’ll be able to provide workforce supply chain logistics to help them get there,” Rogers said. “This will be a living, breathing organic service that will always require adjustments and inputs to make it more and more effective.”

Arkansans should gain a long-term permanent solution for career-development, according to Rogers.

“The dollars that we continue to invest will be better leveraged over the long term than they are today,” he said. “This needs to be so robust with such good outcomes that no matter who is elected in the future, from the governor to legislators, that the system will weather each election cycle.”