NW event promotes training for careers without college

Colt Fancher (from left), a senior at Gravette High School; Rebecca Davis, a junior; and Zayan Rodarte, a junior, listen Tuesday to Steve Lewis of McDonald’s during the Northwest Workforce Summit Career Exploration Expo at the Northwest Arkansas Convention Center in Springdale.
Colt Fancher (from left), a senior at Gravette High School; Rebecca Davis, a junior; and Zayan Rodarte, a junior, listen Tuesday to Steve Lewis of McDonald’s during the Northwest Workforce Summit Career Exploration Expo at the Northwest Arkansas Convention Center in Springdale.

Earning a bachelor's degree isn't the only path to success in an increasingly mobile and global economy, but neither is a high school diploma enough, experts and Arkansas employers said last week.

Employers regionally and nationally still need people trained to fix cars, provide health care, assemble pipes and build machines, filling "middle-skill" jobs that typically require a few years or less of training after high school and often provide comfortable salaries despite any reputation otherwise, said Ted Abernathy, managing partner of the consulting firm Economic Leadership in North Carolina.

By the numbers

Selected middle-skill jobs’ average income in Arkansas, 2015

• Registered nurse: $57,000

• Construction supervisors: $54,000

• Tool and die makers: $44,000

• Stonemasons: $39,000

• Welders and related jobs: $37,000

• Plumbers and pipe-fitters: $36,000

• Construction equipment operators: $35,000

• Computer and office machine repairers: $34,000

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

"You cannot be a competitive place in America without skilled labor," he told about 200 public school teachers and others at the Springdale Chamber of Commerce's second Workforce Summit. When it comes to middle-skilled workers, the most ambitious regions "train them, they grow them, they attract them, they retrain them -- and those places have the competitive advantage."

Schools and businesses across Benton and Washington counties are trying to make Northwest Arkansas such a place, partnering to catch students, like Springdale High School senior Maribelle Escutia, who want to become a physician's assistant or a welder and don't want or need to go to a four-year college to get there.

"I want to just get started," without the time or debt often needed for a bachelor's degree, said Escutia, who hopes to go into nursing. She joined hundreds of other students at the event's second day, which included about 40 area employers looking for potential hires and a tour of Northwest Technical Institute in Springdale.

Pea Ridge Public School District offers a Manufacturing and Business Academy charter school and partners with companies including Wal-Mart and Bentonville Plastics, for example. Bentonville schools offer part-time apprenticeships with area businesses for school credit.

Springdale and other districts together have more than 300 students enrolled in certificate programs at the technical institute. Thousands of people of all ages go to the institute and Northwest Arkansas Community College for postsecondary or associate's degree programs as well.

"If you listen to our businesses and you listen to their biggest concerns, their concern is that they have unfilled jobs that they say require middle-skilled employees. They say it all the time," said economist Kathy Deck, director of the University of Arkansas' Center for Business and Economic Research. "There have to be paths other than traditional higher education, college degrees, that lead to economic success."

The Springdale chamber held the event to foster more of those partnerships that aim at the roughly one in four high school graduates who won't go to college but have the temperament for more training, said Perry Webb, chamber president and chief executive officer.

"We all operate in our own little vacuum," he said in an interview. "We're trying to bring all the players into a room."

If a training program can help a young worker get $2 more per hour at the start of his career, the boost could accumulate to hundreds of thousands of dollars more in a lifetime, Perry added.

About half of the country's jobs fall into the middle-skill category, according to the National Skills Coalition, a research and advocacy group in Washington. Almost 60 percent of Arkansas' 1 million jobs fall in the category, as well, based on data from the coalition and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The coalition also reports the state's workers fill about 80 percent of those middle-skilled jobs, leaving tens of thousands of positions open.

The shortage has been a common story around the country as occupations have become more technology-based and the economy has globalized over the past several decades, Harvard Business School researchers wrote in a 2014 report on middle-skilled labor.

Employers focused on training their own employees instead of establishing communitywide chains of schools and companies to find and train an entire workforce, they said, while the country saw a bachelor's degree as more and more essential.

"A majority of Americans do not think everyone should go to college, but the vast majority of parents think their sons and daughters should go, and the students themselves feel the same way," Georgetown University researchers wrote in a 2012 report on career and technical education.

College degrees generally lead to higher income, according to U.S. Census data from 2015. In the four-county Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metropolitan statistical area, adults age 25 or older with only a high school diploma typically made about $29,000 a year at the median, and 12 percent of them were in poverty. Those with a bachelor's degree made $49,000 with 3 percent in poverty, and the trend continued with more advanced degrees.

On the other hand, less than half the students who go to public colleges in Arkansas graduate within six years, according to the state's Department of Higher Education. UA does better, graduating almost two-thirds of its students within six years.

Nationally, some drop out with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and little to show for it, Webb said. Meanwhile, the nation's workforce is full of people alternately underqualified or overqualified for the jobs available or qualified for something else entirely, the Harvard researchers wrote.

"There's people without degrees that don't have jobs yet," said Saul Martinez, another Springdale High senior at the event who's interested in health care or construction jobs, the kind that give on-the-job education instead of requiring years of study before work.

A university spokesman said officials weren't available to comment Friday.

Several middle-skill occupations earn near or around the state's average pay of $38,000, according to the labor bureau. Nurses in the state make about $57,000 on average. Automotive workers and computer repairers fell mostly into the mid-$30,000s on average, while electricians made about $42,000. And many of the jobs give plenty of opportunities for advancement and pay raises, event participants said.

The participants gave a message on higher education more nuanced than the expectation of sending everyone to college: A bachelor's degree can be worth it for those who want to and can get it, but those who don't fit in that group have options -- just don't stop at a high school diploma. People at every educational level share the need to continually update and add to their skills, Abernathy said.

"Our kids can't be happy just finishing high school," said John Riggs IV, chairman of Arkansas' J.A. Riggs Tractor Co. "They need something else."

Riggs is a former state senator and a former Little Rock School Board member.

To fill the middle-skill gap, Harvard and Georgetown researchers and other experts shared the view of Webb, the Springdale chamber president, that businesses and public institutions must build connections with one other. They can then share what kinds of jobs are coming and how best to prepare people for them.

"America's system of middle-skills development needs a kick-start, and the conditions could not be better," the Harvard researchers wrote in their 2014 report.

In that vein, Prairie Grove Public Schools recently applied for a charter school with nursing and construction technology courses, said business teacher Mandy Bartholomew. Northwest Technical Institute is working on expanding its Gravette branch into a full manufacturing program for high school students and adults and on making locations in Benton and Washington counties into centers offering multiple programs so students don't have to travel to Springdale.

The Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce has put together a fabrication lab downtown to allow residents to use 3-D printers and other machinery. Down the road, Multi-Craft Contractors is helping open a robotics lab in downtown Fayetteville that should start taking students early next year, said Tomas Blodgett, the operations director for the company's robotics division, who started there as a machinist.

"The response has been nothing short of phenomenal in my 21 years of doing this," said Mike Harvey, interim president of the Northwest Arkansas Council, a nonprofit that aims to build connections between private and public groups to strengthen the area's economy. The next challenge will be to make sure students can easily move from one educational path to another if they choose, he added, but in general, "it's coming together."

Companies also offer some of their own training. Nabholz Construction, for example, takes on laborers with no training for a starting salary of up to $27,000 and offers four-year apprenticeships to become a carpenter, welder or other skilled craftsman, at which point the salary jumps to at least $40,000 and can keep going up, Jill Booker, a project manager in the company's concrete division, told dozens of students at the event.

"We're always looking for somebody," she said, adding she was specifically on the lookout for people with teamwork and other "soft" skills. "We can teach them the rest."

Bartholomew said she was glad to get in touch with other schools and see how they build their programs, but another important piece of the event was hearing people like Booker say they have jobs waiting.

"Students are almost embarrassed they're going to NTI or some technical school," she said. "This just emphasizes that we need that."

Metro on 11/14/2016

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