By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A new phrase drives economic development these days.
It is: workforce development.
St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce President Patt Lilly says companies the past few years have suffered from a lack of trained workers. So, the community has taken steps to address the problem.
“Growing our local workforce is really all about the opportunity to have students and teachers, Barry, understand what the opportunities here are,” Lilly tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline.
Lilly says 12-to-15 St. Joseph companies have been hiring high school students for years, giving them a taste of life in the working world.
“Oftentimes, in this day and age, kids are so busy doing extracurricular things they don’t work,” Lilly says. “It dawned on me one day, talking to some parents, it’s like, oh my goodness, I explored a lot of things as a kid I didn’t want to do after I worked at it for a while. But, kids today, a lot of kids, I think, go to college and have never actually had a part-time job. And so that career exploration becomes very important.”
While St. Joseph area businesses seek trained workers, high school students seek to become acquainted with various jobs, all in an effort to see what might be attractive once they graduate. Lilly says high schoolers need to explore as many opportunities as possible, adding career exploration cannot be overemphasized, because it gives a teenager a taste of life in the working world.
“That career exploration becomes very important, where they can go in and actually do something that they think they want to do, whether that’s being a machinist, whether that’s working at Mosaic, whatever the case may be,” Lilly says. “But they can go in and experience the job. Then they’re getting trained on the job.”