By Jim Walton, CEO, Brand Acceleration, Inc.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve received many calls from communities needing help with marketing programs aimed at attracting workers and residents. With unemployment rates in the two percent range in many areas, economic development professionals are realizing that traditional workforce development efforts are often just too slow. Waiting for educators to crank our workers in two to four years is unacceptable. Employers need workers now!
As a result, the nation has seen a rapid change in K12 and post-secondary schools. Traditional liberal arts programs are giving way to vocational or trade programs that quickly prepare students, including adults, for in-demand jobs. Programs like computer numerical control, or CNC, machining, robotics, welding, plant maintenance, engineering, and others are flourishing.
For a long time, kids in the middle, those students not well-suited for a four-year school, were often left out, relegated to fast food or other low-paying jobs with little or no future. Today, they are among the most targeted prospective workers. Dubbed New Collar Jobs by IBM and others, America is discovering that training and hiring those kids in the middle is a necessity. For more on the subject, click here.
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Brand Acceleration is an award-winning marketing and public relations firm working nationwide, exclusively in economic and community development marketing.
