Talent Development Is a Key Ingredient for Economic Development (cont.)

These grants are designed to improve the training available at community colleges by connecting employers with the schools to provide more and better teachers, state of the art equipment, and a greater capacity to teach more students. In short, they will improve the ability of our community colleges to develop talent.

With these two initiatives well established, it is now time to move talent development into a central role in the economy. This, of course, cannot be accomplished at the national level.

The U. S. national economy is actually the collection and integration of many regional economies. It is at the regional level where economic development is implemented and where the effects of economic shocks are felt. And it is at the regional level where talent development can help to spur economic growth and provide hope and opportunity to regions that have lost both.

Examples of such areas would be those most affected by global trade. Dr. Gary Green from Forsyth Tech Community College in North Carolina likes to say that back in the 1980s, North Carolina’s economy was well diversified. They had textiles, tobacco, and furniture.Well, 20 years later, all three are nearly gone from the state.

Some areas of North Carolina responded to the challenge and are now centers for innovation.What they and other successful areas have in common are a strong group of talented professionals, usually centered around a university, that incubate new industries. This happened in Silicon Valley 20 years ago around Stanford and Berkeley where information technology flourished, and more recently in the Research Triangle of North Carolina where Duke, UNC and others spawned the biotech industry.

For each example of a successful transition though, there are numerous other areas that were not so lucky. Much of the Upper Midwest has yet to recover from the decline in the steel and auto industries. Areas of the Carolinas are in similar positions after the textile companies moved overseas.What each of these areas has in common is that a large percentage of their talent base possesses skills that are now obsolete.

The government has programs such as Trade Adjustment Assistance that help to meet the short term needs of such individuals, but no program or initiative exists that encourages and assists in the building of a new economy.

Of course, there is another area that is now the focus of building and rebuilding and that is the Gulf Coast. For a number of reasons, the city of New Orleans has seen decreasing economic activity and the departure of its most talented citizens. And now what remained of its infrastructure has been destroyed.

Lower Mississippi received a boost to its economy when gaming was introduced 15 years ago as an alternative to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. But now with gambling available in communities all across the country and with the tourism infrastructure destroyed, there is no anchor for the regional economy.

The challenges brought on by this devastation are only magnified by the fact that Mississippi and Louisiana were ranked 49th and 50th in the nation in educational attainment.

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