Making Cents Conference: Beg, borrow, and steal! Tools for responding to market demand

Guest blogger Brenda Schuster (Youth and HIV Technical Advisor for Catholic Relief Services) reports back on a packed workforce development track session that explored methodologies and tools for understanding and meeting market demand for export oriented, national and local industries.

I can’t drink coffee. A single espresso keeps me awake for three days and makes my tonsils twitch. Were things to be otherwise, I would happily join the other Conference-goers in a comforting ebb and flow of chemical withdrawal – assuming, of course, that the coffee was organic and fair trade, the cups free of chemical dyes and the sugar ISO-certified.

I pay more so I can be picky. Because more and more people are like me (in their pickiness, not their tonsils), enterprises of all sizes have to continually upgrade their processes, products, functions, and chains in order to be competitive – and particularly if they aspire to access the global value chain.

Upgrading has implications for the workforce. It means that needs are constantly changing. In the case of developing countries, it could be that a whole host of skills and occupations totally unknown today will be totally essential in three years’ time. What should you do? According to presenters you should beg, borrow, and steal whatever successful, proven tools you can.

• Do your research. The US Department of Labor sponsors a database and website with search engines, technical reports, questionnaires, and toolkits for download called O*Net: www.onetcenter.org (database); www.onetonline.org (search engine); and www.mynextmove.org (easy-to-use occupational information search engine and career overviews with links to job search support). O*Net has a staggering amount of (free!) information that would be scary if it weren’t so cool. The database contains comprehensive information on more than 857 occupations. At least 100 are updated every year, and no data is more than five years old. It reflects intel from more than 40,000 businesses and hundreds of thousands of job-holders. You can download tools to use in your workforce development program. You can also download the entire database and incorporate it into your own web site, career counseling software, etc. The information on it is USA-based but largely transferable elsewhere. It just needs a bit of tweaking. So far it has been downloaded in more than 90 countries.
• Get industry representatives directly involved in training future workers. The Bridgemont Community and Technical College (BCTC) keeps up to date on industry needs and standards by having private sector representatives on their departmental advisory committees and industry associations included on their board. BCTC gives direct responses to company enquiries, but at the same time maintains a highly proactive Sector Strategy. In other words, instead of going from company to company to figure out what skills the market needs, BCTC workshops with multiples companies within specific sectors to develop (and continually update) a training curriculum that they then share across the state technical college system.
• Plan ahead. New skills will be needed as companies upgrade. One of the biggest barriers to an industry’s development is “bottleneck occupations” – key gatekeeper positions responsible for the rapid expansion, or quick demise, of an industry faced with either upgrading or going out of business. (Think quality assurance officers.) Value chains are governed by standards; knowing these helps you predict what skills will be needed in the future.

After all, the future, and how to make it a better place for youth, is what we drink all that vile coffee for in the first place.