‘Go Build Georgia’ tours to talk skilled worker shortage
Dalton Daily News
Rachel Brown
02-09-2012
That’s the number of skilled craft job opportunities expected to open in Georgia over the next year. The number of people trained to fill them? Not nearly enough, according to officials with the Governor’s Office of Workforce Development promoting the Go Build Georgia program.
The program, designed to encourage more people to learn skilled trades, made the first of 13 stops across the state this week at the Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy, formerly the Whitfield Career Academy. Educators, business representatives and others from 14 Northwest Georgia counties attended.
“We know by 2016 we will be in a crisis situation,” said Tricia Pridemore, executive director of the Office of Workforce Development. “For every four that retire, we are producing one replacement.”
Pridemore said the office is researching how many trained potential employees the District 1 area, which covers 14 North Georgia counties including Whitfield and Murray, could reasonably produce. She said more information will available later this year.
March is when the office kicks off a media campaign through newspaper advertisements, radio commercials and other strategies to raise public awareness of Georgia’s need for carpenters, electricians, line workers, welders, machinists, truck drivers, masonry workers and all other skilled workers people can’t become just by going to college for four years.
Joe Yarbrough, Mohawk Industries vice president of operations, said society has “created an environment where it’s deemed to be not only undesirable but sometimes shameful” to have a blue collar job.
“That’s wrong,” he said. “What’s really sad though is at my company, we could fill probably 30, 40 or 50 skilled jobs where we can’t find the applicants with the needed skill sets.”
It begins in the school system where teachers, counselors and others can help inform kids of the opportunities available to them in skilled fields rather than pushing college as the ultimate goal for all, said Craig McDaniel, president of Georgia Northwestern Technical College.
Georgia Northwestern opened its newest campus in a wing inside the Career Academy last fall where it serves traditional and high school students taking dual enrollment classes. McDaniel said the jobs students can earn with a technical certificate or degree often pay higher wages than do many jobs requiring four-year degrees.
“These jobs average almost $47,000 a year,” he said. “School teachers don’t make $47,000 a year, at least not for a long time.”
Career Academy Chief Executive Officer Tim Fleming said the school has more than 100 dual enrollment students this year compared to just 13 last year. Prompting from Dalton’s business industries led the Career Academy to change in the last year from focusing on soft skills and liberal arts academics to career-oriented classes and the core academics to help them prepare for skilled jobs.
Yet more work is needed, several speakers insisted.
Beth Hayes, a counselor at Phoenix High School, said the Career Academy’s plans for a regional career fair in May are good, but the fair is only one piece of the puzzle.
“I think we could make this work,” she said, “but the disconnect is between our employers and our students in the classroom. We have to bridge that gap.”
Hayes said many students at the special purpose school are “hungry for a job” and would do better at finding one if ongoing mentoring relationships were developed between local skilled workers and students.