PowerUp Academy aids underemployed
From our weekly issue dated September 02, 2009
Lowell Gibson, president of Grants Pass-based Recognition Specialties, has a problem: It can be quite difficult to find qualified employees.
“It’s hard for us to find somebody who has skills in our niche,” Gibson said. “It’s not something you find readily available.”
Fortunately for Gibson and other area employers, help is available through programs like the PowerUp Productivity Academy, which enables workers to upgrade their skills to better match the needs of small businesses.
Although the common perception among workers is that there is a lack of family wage jobs in Southwestern Oregon, many employers struggle to fill high-paying, specialized positions. That growing gap between the needs of employers and the skills available in the labor pool has kept some area companies from expanding, and could eventually cause some to leave the region.
Those issues prompted the Rogue Valley Workforce Development Council to form several partnerships to bring the PowerUp Academy to fruition. Participating entities are Southern Oregon University at Ashland, the Job Council, Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc. and Rogue Community College.
Gibson said that his firm has spent the last 18 months focusing on bolstering its existing personnel, and that the academy has aided that process tremendously.
“We would like the people we hire to already be trained in some areas, but that’s probably not going to happen,” Gibson said.
He noted, “So we’re taking people who are under-employed; we bring them in here and work them up to the point where they’re getting what they should be getting pay-wise and compensation-wise, and it’s filling the void that we as the employer have.”
The program is based largely on employer needs, Gibson said, and it accommodates businesses when developing training schedules.
“It’s hard for companies to send off employees for a half day or a full day of training,” he said. “But they seem to be very considerate of that and try to make the classes at times that work for us and ways that work better for us.”
For example, Gibson said that he used to handle the company’s Internet development directly. But some of his employees have been trained in that area, and their abilities now exceed his.
“As they show skills and we’re training them, they respond properly, and we bump them up through the ranks pretty quickly,” Gibson said. “After a year or so, you have people who are highly trained and very qualified.”
The academy determined the needs of businesses by contacting approximately 52 of them in S.W. Oregon. That led to the discovery of nearly 900 new or replacement positions that could be created within the next two years.
Aside from that, it has been estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 high-wage positions may exist in the area that employers will struggle to fill in that time.
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RCC President Peter Angstadt said that the school works with employers and employees to try and find the best matches between them.
“There are employers saying that they haven’t been able to find employees,” he said. “If they could find four or five qualified employees with those skill sets, they’d hire them right away.
“That’s what we bring together, knowledge of the openings with knowledge of how to train people for those openings.”
Angstadt said that RCC’s nursing program had 180 qualified applicants last year. But the program requires an 8-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio and requires clinical space for hands-on training.
A few years ago, said the RCC chief, the program had only 24 slots. But through partnerships with area hospitals, RCC was able to expand that to 36.
“They provide us financial support and with some of the rotational space we need for the student nurse to have the practicum experience they need to be on the floor learning from current experienced nursing staff,” he said. “As we all get together to develop more efficient ways of doing rotations and such, we hope to go even higher.”
RCC conducted a series of seminars and workshops last year on lean manufacturing, Angstadt said. Many of those types of classes utilize self-paced models, which enable greater flexibility for employers and employees.
“There are instructors there to work with students, but the students really come in at their own times and work through different sets of skill modules,” Angstadt said. “We can work around people’s schedules.”
Unique to the PowerUp Productivity Academy is its emphasis on recruiting the under-employed, rather than the unemployed. The reason is because that segment of the population often has good work ethics and good habits, but is unaware of career-enhancing pathways.
The program also utilizes “reverse engineering” of professional occupations in order to determine the experiences that lead to success and identify the barriers and roadblocks that can prevent it.
In November 2007, the academy was awarded the Oregon Economic Development Association’s Outstanding Collaborative Partnership award.
Gibson said that the program’s success may prove critical in establishing a skilled workforce for the region’s future.
“We’re looking for ways to attract companies to the area, and have a lot to offer,” he said. “But if we don’t have good, solid workforce potential that good companies can move here and draw from, we’re lacking a big, big piece of the pie.”
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