business backgrounder | employment & workplace
Greenwood. “We are moving into the K-12 arena
recognizing that we need to get good students
interested in manufacturing and the aerospace
industry early.”
the future of workforce training
“Second only to lack of specific job skills,
poor soft skills are the biggest problem employers tell us
they have when looking for potential employees.”
— Mike Hudson, project manager, AWB Institute
Even with the success and momentum built by the
aerospace industry, a daunting task lies ahead for the workforce training system. With a seemingly neverending economic downturn, career and remedial training has never been needed more. However, federal
and state monies for workforce training are becoming more precarious. With falling revenues, Washington
state is looking at doing things differently.
Last year, the AWB Institute joined forced with the Workforce Board to create the Retooling Washington’s
Workforce initiative. The project aims to identify opportunities and ideas that can be quickly implemented
and examine every part of the workforce training system. “By looking at the system holistically,” Hudson
said, “we hope to find more efficiency in the system.”
By using workforce training resources more efficiently and other efforts, workforce professionals hope
they can keep the skills gap from going from a problem to a full-blown crisis.
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