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Help Wanted
ARKANSAS DEALING WITH SKILLED LABOR SHORTAGE
by Dwain Hebda
A shiny red semi anchors one end of the high school parking lot. On all sides, streams of students, high school and younger, mill around, check out the graphics and await their turn inside. It’s one of hundreds of scheduled stops the rig will make this year, from high schools and two-year college campuses to community festivals and other events.
The trailer of the gleaming rig, branded Be Pro Be Proud, contains a bevy of hands-on multimedia displays set into several stations. Each station highlights a different skilled career – welding, plumbing, et cetera. But there’s one purpose they all share: Inspiring the next generation of skilled labor in Arkansas.
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“I think the Be Pro Be Proud program is a hallmark of what we’re up to and it’s changing the conversation,” said Randy Zook, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce and the Associated Industries of Arkansas. Zook’s team created the program and the concept has been so successful, ASCC has sold licenses for the idea to Georgia and South Carolina for use there.
“We’ve had about 75,000 student visits across the platform to date and it’s booked solid,” Zook said. “It’s in great demand at the campus level. It’s compelling and informative for kids and gives them an inkling of what a given career field is involved with. It’s getting some traction, there’s no question about it.”
Be Pro Be Proud is just one initiative that has come out of the business, civic and educational sectors of the state, each trying to jigsaw a piece of the skilled labor shortage puzzle. All across Arkansas, from major manufacturers and multi-state construction firms down to Main Street plumbing electrical companies, existing skilled workers are getting older with far fewer young craftspeople waiting in the wings to take their places.
The primary reason for the shortfall is a one-two punch of the tsunami of Baby Boomers reaching retirement age and years of selling high school kids on four-year degrees as the lone path to career and financial success, said Dr. Robin Myers, chancellor of Arkansas State University-Mountain Home. “We’re trying to overcome two or three decades of heavy marketing of a four-year degree, you need a professional degree. That’s what’s been drilled into the parents of young people coming through the school systems now and the young people themselves,” he said.
“I think the message is finally getting out there that there’s something really great and wonderful about a technical education and having technical competencies and the ability to work with your hands and create things. I think that message is beginning to resonate and we’re beginning to overcome that indoctrination that’s gone on for so long.”
In trying to address the problem, companies and communities often hamstrung their own efforts by rowing in separate directions. Today, however, ASU-Mountain Home and its Secondary Technical Center, are good examples of the collaborative strides that have been made in many communities to combine economic development, higher education and other industry stakeholders.
“Not just speaking for us, but all the two-year colleges in the state, we work very closely with our local industries,” Myers said. “We look at what the demands are out there in the workplace for the skillsets that we’re proposing and in almost every single case, the industry is directly involved in the development of the curriculum so that it fits the needs of what they are looking for in their workforce.”
“Our mechatronics program, for instance, was designed
Inside the Be Pro Be Proud trailer there are a number of stations, each highlighting a different skilled career, like welding, plumbing and truck, train and heavy equipment operation.
Students from Cabot High School get some hands-on experience in the Be Pro Be Proud truck for the kick-off of Career and Technical Education Month.
for a person who’s a technician on a robotic line and able to troubleshoot problems and devise solutions. All of the courses in that curriculum were skills that were needed and identified by our employers as what we needed to incorporate into the training program.”
Another shining example of collaboration lies in Fort Smith where K-12, secondary education, industry and the local chamber of commerce have aligned to craft an ambitious plan for the future.
“In 2017, when I got here, we started talking about strategic planning and how to have dialogue with our community about what we wanted our district to look like in five years,” said Dr. Doug Brubaker, superintendent of the Fort Smith Public Schools. “One of the big needs we were hearing was the need for enhanced opportunities for career and technology education to build opportunities so our kids could either walk across the stage and secure a high-paying job in a high-demand field, or potentially use the relevant experience they get to further their education at a post-secondary institution.”
The school district joined the Fort Smith Regional Chamber of Commerce, the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and area businesses to build a strategic plan for the tentatively named Career and Technology Center. In May 2018, citizens passed a millage increase to pay for the $13.7 million facility, which is expected to come online next year and enhance, in a big way, existing resources in the area.
“Our existing partnership with Western Arkansas Technical Center, which is UA-Fort Smith, includes some really great instructors and some great programs in our district,” Brubaker said. “(The new center) becomes a site where those programs can be expanded. We found that about six to seven percent of our kids were engaged in (technical) classes and opportunities. We really need to expand the bandwith so that we’re serving two to three times that many. That’s the goal.”
Zook graded Arkansas’s labor development efforts at about a B on the strength of such efforts, but said there was still work to be done. In particular, he said as educational efforts multiply – notably the state’s secondary technical centers that today
CONNECTING THE DOTS MIKE ROGERS, TYSON FOODS
Mike Rogers got his first taste of a career in high school and it’s stayed with him ever since. At 16, through a cooperative education program, he met David Evans, a northwest Arkansas entrepreneur. Over the next 20 years, Rogers worked for Evans on a variety of endeavors, including various maintenance jobs at Springdale’s Frez-n-Stor, a refrigerated warehouse of which Evans was president and CEO. That experience solidified in him the value of exposing young people to skilled trades early on as a pathway to a rewarding career. It also guided his 20 years as a teacher at Career Academy of Siloam Springs. There, he developed the blueprint for the training and career development programs he now heads at Tyson Foods as senior director of maintenance and refrigeration, starting in 2017.
“Internal candidates are always our first option for a skills transfer, somebody who has currently proven themselves as a dynamic team member,” he said. “We also find a lot of success, maybe even a fourth of our maintenance techs, from the production floor. A front-line team member that has demonstrated interest, works in a protein-centric environment and comes to maintenance is worth double what they were in production.”
Rogers’ system implements a highly integrated and clearly defined skills improvement path for employees looking to move up in their career, either through the company’s internal network or by taking classes through one of the 40-and-counting community colleges that partner with Tyson all over the country. “We have computer-based training and I have groups of people that travel out to plant locations and do training events at the location,” he said. “We have corporate facilities with each one of our major plants having a maintenance training lab with simulators and computers. And, we have maintenance-trained supervisors from across our company who develop the skills within our team members.
“I’ve taken what I did in Siloam Springs and I’ve got people working in my group now that have done that at 60 other locations across the company to develop the incumbent team worker to, for instance, get their electrical license or to get their apprenticeship. And that apprenticeship piece has been really good because that counts toward 24 hours of college credit at our partner schools.” Rogers’ system also strengthened the process for reaching potential employees in high school and community colleges to help them align their classroom training with in-demand skills at Tyson. It’s a highly collaborative process which he said the company is proud to partner in for the good of the company and of individual communities.
“We also see this as corporate responsibility,” he said. “Our communities are very important to us, making sure that we’re a good life partner and financial partner for our organization and our community around us. When we do these initiatives with technical schools, we make it a point to be a contributor and stakeholder.” “We want to be the catalyst; we don’t want to Tyson-ize a system. We want to find folks who will match funds, who will match vision, who will match partnership with us.” •
Careers TECHNICAL & AVERAGE SALARIES
INDUSTRIAL MAINTENANCE $43,442
MAINTENANCE PLANNER $58,203
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL TECH $60,427
MAINTENANCE/REFRIGERATION SUPERVISOR $69,632
ROBOTICS TECH $86,985
MAINTENANCE MANAGER $103,442
Locations in Arkansas With production facilities across the globe, there’s good chance your passion is close to home here in Arkansas.
AMMONIA REFRIGERATION $48,938
AUTOMATION TECH $66,900
MAINTENANCE/REFRIGERATION SUPERINTENDENT $76,955
PLANT ENGINEER $113,400
reach all but two Arkansas high schools with concurrent skills training by local colleges – state funding must keep pace accordingly.
“There’s still room to improve and grow that system with continuing and expanding support,” Zook said. “The system is better and it’s more readily available than it’s been in the past. It’s a matter of making sure now that funding is kept in line with growth and with inflation costs.”
“There has been absolutely zero dollar increase in career and technical ed funding for, like, 15 years. It’s the same exact amount of around $20.5 million a year and clearly you can’t keep current equipment with a static, inflexible funding source. So, that’s the next big opportunity to improve the system across the state.” Another area of improvement is creating smoother and more accessible pathways for adults looking to train for a new career. Arkansas Sen. Jane English of North Little Rock (R-34), an outspoken proponent of career development, said more can be done to help these adults, especially those attempting to reset their lives following incarceration or addiction.
“I think there is a gap there,” she said. “I have always said education is kindergarten through career. We spend a lot of time and energy talking about K-12 and that’s where we spend the biggest bulk of our money. Then we talk a lot about higher ed. But there is this gap in between.”
“In Arkansas, we have something like 50 percent of the people in the workforce. So, we’ve got a lot of people who aren’t. We need to try to figure out how we reach some of those people to help them upgrade their skills. From my standpoint, everybody that wants a better job should have the opportunity to increase their skill level. That’s what makes our economy grow.
“There’s not a concerted sit-down at the table, and that’s where my focus has been. Too often, I think, much of our adult education stuff is tied up in federal programs and it’s hard to get people to sit down at the table and figure out how do we make all that happen at the state level, because our adults need that same opportunity.”
The issues Arkansas faces are not limited to The Natural State. Last year, Deloitte Consulting and the Conference Board released a study that placed the gap between manufacturing jobs and the skilled workers needed to fill them at more than 500,000 positions. Meaning, Arkansas cannot rely on simply importing workers from elsewhere to meet its needs.
Given this, English said communities must be accountable for future-focused thinking when it comes to career development programs. She also said the state must respect the line between enabling these local efforts and interfering with them.
“I think (Arkansas is) getting better. There’s a much larger conversation today than there was 3 to 5 years ago which pleases me to no end,” she said. “There are a lot of things going on and where it’s really happening is at the local level.”
“The state can do a lot of things to set up opportunities and clear the way for schools, whether secondary schools, colleges or whatever, to do some things. But at the end of the day, a lot of it depends on that local community and what they decide to do for a future and what that future is going to look like.” •
Arkansas Farm Bureau Senior Education Coordinator Matt Jackson takes students through Farm Bureau’s new, state-of-the-art mobile teaching tool, the AgTech Training Lab, during a visit to Arkansas Tech University. Part of Arkansas Farm Bureau’s Ag in the Classroom program, the AgTech Training Lab features realistic simulations of what it’s like to operate farm equipment.
Jason Green, vice president of human resources for ABB’s Fort Smith manufacturing facility, is on the front line of the skilled labor shortage. So, it’s probably no surprise he and his ABB team have been proactive in developing internal and external workforce training programs.
A little over three years ago ABB, a leading manufacturer of industrial motors, started benchmarking corporate and community technical training programs around the country to find best practices. The effort yielded some valuable insights.
“First, we had to make sure we understood what our current and future needs were,” Green said. We also had to start much earlier to introduce career opportunities to more middle school students.
“The other thing we discovered is this had to be a businessled initiative. We’re very fortunate we have higher education and K-12 partners, but most of what they’ve developed over the years is what they think we needed in our facilities. We finally realized business and industry had to be much more vocal about our actual needs.”
Behind Green’s leadership, ABB became a key player in a local coalition among industry, education and the local chamber of commerce to develop a comprehensive plan for fostering young peoples’ interest in skilled careers and backing that up with targeted technical education.
At the community level, existing programs were enhanced among the most in-demand skillsets – advanced manufacturing, health care and information technology. The coalition also rallied community support in 2018 to publicly fund a $13.7 million career and technology center to be administered through the K-12 school district and benefiting stakeholders community-wide.
Internally, ABB provided students with innovative opportunities to round out classroom skills with real-world applications. “The students we have today, who have these great concurrent classes to take advantage of, were missing real world application of the skills they are learning,” Green said. We launched our first youth apprenticeship program in June 2019 with seven high school seniors and two college freshmen, working in our plant.
The system worked so well ABB is replicating it in its other facilities across the country. And, Green said, other Arkansas communities are reaching out for help in duplicating its success. “This model is replicable in other parts of the state,” Green said. “We are committed to doing whatever we can do to ensure that not only our region, but the entire state is successful when it comes to career development and technical education.” • THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY JASON GREEN, ABB
For centuries, the Arkansas Delta and other river floodplains have been bountiful sources of food and habitat for migrating ducks. Greentree reservoirs on public and private land are a crucial component of this habitat. Greentree reservoirs, largely developed in the 1950s, are bottomland forests that are artificially flooded by land managers to provide duck habitat and duck-hunting opportunities. These reservoirs offer red oak acorns and invertebrates for food as well as thermal cover and pair isolation — nearly everything ducks need during mid- to late-winter stopovers.
AGFC manages nearly 50 GTRs across the state, providing more than 50,000 acres of flooded forests for waterfowl habitat and worldrenowned public hunting opportunities. AGFC staff, along with other expert habitat managers, began a formal assessment of forest health conditions within these GTRs in 2014.
Forest health data indicate the composition and health of these forests have gradually changed and declined, leaving these habitats less valuable to ducks. The most beneficial red oaks have proven especially susceptible to years of prolonged and growing season flooding, but even more water-tolerant species are showing stress.
“Many years of artificial water management that differs substantially from natural conditions have stressed many tree species in these sites,” said Luke Naylor, AGFC waterfowl program coordinator.
Scientific information gathered during the last few decades calls for a more natural and sustainable management philosophy for these habitats. For the last several years, AGFC has started to deploy different strategies to provide high-quality waterfowl habitat, and hunting, for the long term.
Delaying intentional artificial flooding to a more beneficial time of year, the adoption of new management plans and infrastructure renovation are all geared to reduce stressors on water-intolerant trees and improve management capacity. Additional forest health assessments have been initiated as well as detailed reviews to evaluate hydrology, identify needed infrastructure changes and develop restoration plans for each GTR.
To date, GTR reviews have been conducted on 12 WMAs resulting in preliminary restoration plans and infrastructure modifications. “These renovations will not be cheap,” Naylor said. “Many GTRs have a large amount of infrastructure installed over many decades. Much of this infrastructure is in poor condition and in need of major repair.”
More than 300 miles of levees and more than 400 water-control structures regulate the water on public GTRs in Arkansas, and most of this infrastructure is now 50-60 years old. Current GTR restoration plans are identifying the most critical renovations needed to better manage the flow of water through these habitats.
The AGFC and partners must be creative in funding these vital projects. Luckily for the Commission, the hunters and the ducks, help is available. In addition to traditional wildlife management funding streams, competitive grants are available through programs like the North American Wetlands Conservation Act.
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Public Greentree Reservoirs in Arkansas
50,000-plus
300-plus
Miles of levees
400-plus
Henry Gray Hurrican Lake WMA GTR - shows timber loss due to prolonged flooding from new precedent of high water events and U.S Corp water management.
The act, created in 1989, conserves North America’s waterfowl, fish and wildlife resources while producing a variety of environmental and economic benefits. Its success is driven by partnerships involving federal, state and local governments, nonprofit organizations such as The Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, and community groups.
AGFC has partnered with Ducks Unlimited to submit the first two of many expected NAWCA grant proposals to help fund GTR renovation projects. The first two proposals
are linked to GTR projects on Earl Buss Bayou DeView WMA, and Ducks Unlimited has stepped up to administer these grants and provide engineering design support. AGFC expects the next set of NAWCA grant proposals will be for GTR projects on Henry Hurricane Lake WMA.
“Securing external funding takes time, and necessary changes won’t happen overnight,” Naylor said. “We’re in this for the long haul and there are no quick fixes.” Visit AGFC.com for more information about Greentree Reservoir Management in Arkansas. •
