Workforce Development: A Region's Key Business Retention and Expansion Tool

by Barbara Johnson and Liza Sherman, Senior Vice President, and Director, Business Development and Workforce, Greater New Orleans, Inc.

Note: this article was written before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

While New Orleans will face an entirely new set of challenges to workforce development and business retention in the years to come, Economic Development America believes that the workforce-industry partnerships that the region has created remain excellent models worth sharing with other communities. In the Greater New Orleans region, as in regions throughout the United States, workforce development has come to the forefront as a key driver in business attraction, retention and expansion. Industries such as manufacturing, healthcare and information technology report a struggle to find qualified workers to meet the higher skill requirements of today’s workplace. The looming retirement of a large percentage of the U.S. workforce – The Big Crew Change – over the next 15 years creates a double whammy for industry in meeting its workforce requirements.

The raging debate in communities throughout the U.S. over the benefits and dangers of “offshore outsourcing” underscores the impact and importance of a qualified, costeffective talent pool in attracting and keeping companies and jobs in an area. Consequently, economic developers are being catapulted into a leadership role in brokering workforce resources to beat the competition for jobs with other regions across the U.S. and the world.

As with any region, the New Orleans area has workforce assets and challenges. The region offers a talent pool of over 80,000 college students from 10 institutions of higher education, including Tulane, Loyola, Xavier, Dillard and the University of New Orleans. A Workforce Assessment conducted recently for Greater New Orleans, Inc., ranked the New Orleans region 25th of 350 metropolitan areas in the number of students graduating from post-secondary education in the sciences.

At the other end of the workforce skills continuum, a December 2004 Council for a Better Louisiana statewide employer survey reported that:

• more than 70 percent of employers in Louisiana have a difficult time finding qualified workers;
• nearly 40 percent say recruitment is more difficult today than it was five years ago; and
• 47 percent say the skill requirements of entry-level employees are rising.

These issues are reflected in the approximately 10,000 current job vacancies reported in key industry sectors in the New Orleans area, and represent primarily technical jobs which require two years or less of post-secondary training.

Greater New Orleans, Inc. (GNO, Inc.), the public-private economic development organization for the 10-parish New Orleans region, has forged a powerful regional partnership of business, civic, university and government leadership. Workforce development is one of the three critical arms of GNO, Inc.’s focused job creation strategy, centered around target industry sectors with labor shortages: Film and video, healthcare/biotechnology, and the advanced manufacturing trades in the shipbuilding, oil and gas, and chemical sectors.

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