Help Wanted: Smyth County, Virginia

by Sally H. Morgan, Economic and Community Development Director, Smyth County, Virginia

This is the story of a rural county that used a workforce development strategy to bring its dying manufacturing economy robustly back to life.

Smyth County, Virginia, population 33,000, is located in southwestern part of the state along the Interstate 81 corridor. Almost 45 percent of Smyth County’s workforce was employed in manufacturing as of the late 1980s. A large component of the manufacturing base was apparel and furniture production until the period of 1998 to 2003, when a rush of plants closed due to overseas competition, resulting in the loss of four large apparel operations and two major furniture producers.

During that same period, five other industries closed and two manufacturing plants suffered major market-related downturns. The total number of jobs lost was over 2,500 out of a workforce of 15,500, with the resulting unemployment rate peaking at 12.4 percent in January 2003.

Despite these dramatic job losses, the remaining industries in the county (who called themselves the “survivors”) began to experience growth by 2003, and they quickly learned that even in light of high unemployment, they were not able to find the workforce that they needed.Many positions went unfilled.

Creating a plan

In 2003, the Smyth County Industrial Council, an active group of CEOs and plant managers, decided to undertake a study of the Smyth County workforce to examine this problem. The project resulted in the Smyth County Workforce Profile, a 42-page report that concludes with a set of 10 recommendations.

The study methodology was driven by business leaders, who determined the questions to be asked and agreed to validate the report and its findings. An outside consultant conducted extensive interviews with local manufacturers and other major employers (30 in total) regarding their current and future employment needs. About 350 jobs were identified as being open at the time of the study, despite relatively high unemployment. The study identified the lack of employee skill sets as the “disconnect” between the demand for employees and the available supply.

What were the missing skill sets? Many employers complained that the young people completing high school lacked job readiness skills – the so-called “soft skills,” but better defined as “employability skills.” Employability skills actually were viewed as more important by the employers than traditional “hard skills” such as lathe machine operation or welding. The list of soft skills and traits that employers cited needing include: reliability, flexibility, writing skills, positive work ethic, critical thinking, courtesy, basic math knowledge, communications skills, ability to listen, team skills, reading comprehension and motivation to do a good job.

The workforce study also asked about specific hard skills. It found that business leaders could name specific positions that they currently had open, but when asked to describe the skills and traits necessary for those positions, what employers described was not too dissimilar from the soft skills listed above. They included strong mechanical skills, problem solving skills, team skills, knowledge of a variety of manufacturing machines, robotics design skills, ability to handle materials, ability to read blueprints, electronics skills, computer programming skills, good record keeping skills, ability to interpret data, and program management skills.

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