March 2007: Regional report for Southern Oregon
Nicole Palomo operates a C&C machine at Rogue
Community College in White City.
Photo by Jon Meyers
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Will work for workers By
Christina Williams
Oregon take note: There’s a tsunami building in the
Rogue Valley.
Across Josephine and Jackson counties, the former domain of
the timber and agriculture industries, employers are looking
for skilled workers to fill jobs. Looking and looking.
For a variety of reasons, including a low unemployment rate
and a high percentage of retirees moving into the area,
Southern Oregon’s workforce is close to being tapped out,
especially for higher-skilled jobs. The situation has motivated
business leaders to pull together an effort to better
coordinate the region’s training resources, better
connect with business to find out their needs and better market
job opportunities to young workers.
It’s an ambitious undertaking and something others in
the state should watch. After all, the demographic shift
that will become more apparent with each baby boomer retirement
will eventually spur a statewide crunch.
“No matter where you are on the workforce crisis scale,
I promise you it will get worse. What every county needs is a
tsunami workforce plan. Because the tsunami is
coming.”
That’s how Audrey Theis put it. The Portland-based
consultant is working with state officials and national groups
on just this issue. She spoke on a panel at the annual Southern
Oregon Business Conference earlier this year to an audience of
about 300 people convened at the Rogue Valley Country Club in
Medford. The evening’s topic: the workforce crisis.
Speakers one after another outlined the situation: Pretty much
everyone in Southern Oregon who wants to work is working and
companies that want to expand can’t find the people to
fill the jobs they want to create.
The region is experiencing historically low unemployment
levels — 4.9% in Jackson County at the end of 2006.
“It’s about the bottom for what we’ve seen
for this region,” says Guy Tauer, regional economist for
the Oregon Employment Department. “It’s no longer
an employers’ market, which may give the impression that
everyone who wants a job has one.”
Jorge Yant started feeling the pain a few years ago. When the
CEO of Ashland-based health-care company Plexis started his
company in 1996, unemployment in the Rogue Valley was
relatively high and he had an easy time filling jobs. But a few
years ago the balance shifted and the company’s technical
programming jobs sat vacant. Plexis started working with a
company in Vietnam and now outsources more jobs overseas (107)
than it employs in Ashland (80).
“My preference would be to have the jobs here,”
Yant says.
Plexis is an extreme example. Its jobs are highly technical
and it’s one of the few software companies in the region.
You could argue that Yant could move his company up to the
Portland area and have an easier time finding local programmers
— a truth that’s not lost on Yant.
“We have been committed to staying in Ashland,” he
says. ”It’s my first preference. But we need to
continue to consider our business and our options and
what’s best for Plexis.”
It’s this kind of talk that gets economic development
officials twitchy. Companies such as Plexis are basically cash
importers: Their customers are far flung but they pay taxes and
provide jobs locally. These traded-sector companies are the key
to any economy.
“If our workforce needs are unmet, traded-sector
enterprises will leave,” warns Lee Lanphier, president of
the Rogue Valley Workforce Development Council and president of
Lanphier Associates, a marketing firm. “They don’t
need to be here.”
Working with the Job Council of Southern Oregon, the Workforce
Development Board is hammering out a new system to better make
the connection between workers — with a focus on those in
the 18-to-29 age range — and jobs. Its proponents have
dubbed the program Power Up Oregon and it involves a more
proactive approach to finding out what jobs companies want to
fill and finding the people to fill them.
Jim Fong, executive director of the local Job Council, figures
that 30% of workers in the Rogue Valley are making $10 or less
per hour. Meanwhile higher-wage jobs are sitting vacant. To
Fong, who spends a lot of time thinking about how to move
people out of poverty, this looks like an opportunity.
BUT THE GAP BETWEEN LOW-WAGE AND HIGH-WAGE jobs has a name:
skills. The better-paying gigs require a level of training that
many young workers just don’t have.
Fong estimates 70% of Southern Oregon high schoolers
won’t graduate from a four-year university. But shrinking
budgets have trimmed back much of the vocational training in
high school, he says, and students aren’t being educated
about career options. Meanwhile, people in low-wage jobs often
can’t afford the time it would take to skill up for a
better job.
Over at the 2-year-old Table Rock Campus of Rogue Community
College, in the college’s workforce training center, the
halls are quiet and the training labs are sparsely
populated.
“We have the capacity, but we don’t have the
students,” says Jeanne Howell, associate dean at the
college.
The college is bending over backward to keep training programs
going and will custom-design “fast-track” training
for businesses with a particular need (recent fast-track
programs have included landscaping, aluminum welding and
kitchen skills). But the college has felt the same funding
pinch that has plagued the rest of Oregon’s higher
education institutions.
The diesel technology training program will be a casualty of
funding cuts; it will stop taking new students this summer. The
program is an expensive one for the college to run and demand
has been low — there are 10 students in the current
class, which pencils out to a $7,000-per-student cost for the
college. With such low enrollment figures, the program just
isn’t sustainable.
The market, however, is hungry for their skills. Most of the
students will have jobs before they even finish their
training.
Down the hall and around the corner is the home of the
manufacturing technology training program. Kris Germana,
coordinator of the program and its lead instructor, is having a
quiet afternoon — even while he’s teaching 17
classes. Simultaneously.
Each term, the manufacturing department offers its full course
load, regardless of how many students register. Students are
then free to take the class at their own pace, coming and going
from the machine training room during its open noon-til-8
hours, working with whatever instructor is available on
whatever machine is open. Without the flexible structure
— Germana likens it to the old one-room schoolhouses
— the program, which has 35 students this term, would
probably go the way of the diesel training program.
“It’s our saving grace,” says Germana.
“It’s not a glamorous program so it’s
low-enrollment. If you can’t get 10 people in the class,
it’s a loser for the college.”
BUT THE PROGRAM HAS BEEN A WINNER for Brammo Motorsports, the
Ashland-based maker of small, speedy, futuristic cars. Founder
Craig Bramscher says his company has grown from seven employees
to 63 in the last year and that he’s hired several
workers out of RCC’s manufacturing and automotive
programs.
Unlike some of the other of the region’s manufacturers,
Brammo hasn’t had any trouble finding workers.
“People are pretty passionate about what we do
here,” Bramscher says. “People who want to work
here seek us out.”
In other words, Brammo is a good draw for young workers who
are looking for something cool to do with their 9-5 time.
But Lee Lanphier says the entire workforce system needs to do
better at marketing jobs to workers in the 18-to-29 age
range.
“It’s time we got kids excited about business
again. They have this idea that business is bad,”
Lanphier says. “If you don’t like it, go in and
change it. Stop complaining and pouring coffee at Dutch Bros.
and go somewhere where you can make a difference.”
Getting the message out will take a complicated marketing
effort, something akin to how military recruiters operate:
going where the young people are, building a relationship and
selling them on future potential.
The workforce council will get to practice its selling skills
on a pilot project for Erickson Air Crane, a Central Point
employer of mechanics and engineers who work on heavy-duty
helicopters. The company has agreed to come up with a list of
training requirements for potential employees and will work
with the council and the community college to design the
appropriate curriculum — it will then commit to hiring a
certain number of people who sign up for the training through
an apprentice program.
“That would be a very successful program for us,”
says Eric Fraenkel, vice president of plant operations. Rather
than sending recruiters far and wide to find workers with the
right experience, they will be able to spend their money
locally. “And the people we hire would be local
individuals with family ties. There’s a high chance that
once they’re employed they’ll stay here.”
Erickson’s interest in potentially expanding its
operation to begin building helicopters in Southern Oregon has
the workforce reformers salivating. “We’re going to
sell the sizzle of this,” says Lanphier.
Along with the Job Council, the Rogue Valley Workforce
Development Council is asking Gov. Ted Kulongoski for $100,000
in strategic training funds to get their program working with
Erickson up and running. They see it as a pilot program for the
entire state.
“We’re trying to be responsive to the growing
demand of the coming demographic shift,” says Jim
Fong.
“We have to think fundamentally differently to create a
much more coherent system than currently exists.”
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