Talent Pipeline Management

Built by business, for business, Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) provides employers and their education and workforce development partners with strategies and tools to co-design talent supply chains that connect learners and workers to jobs and career advancement opportunities. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce teaches the TPM framework via the TPM Academy.

The Greater Phoenix Chamber has had significant success customizing and implementing TPM to support Phoenix’s healthcare talent pipeline. The nursing workforce in Arizona, as in most states, is aging quickly and there are no longer enough trained specialty nurses to meet the growing need for their expertise. This hiring difficulty is compounded by the ongoing challenges of turnover among nurses at all levels of experience in most U.S. states.

Arizona is expected to experience a 23% growth in demand for specialized nursing, with 20,508 new openings projected by 2025. As a result of this demand, hospitals must hire expensive traveling nurses and pay extensive overtime in what is a very costly support model. Recruitment for new talent can cost up to $10,000 per nurse, and though these numbers vary by location and facility, when added to costs incurred through orientation, education, and inactive working hours for a nurse preceptor, hospitals can spend around $170,000 on each new nurse they hire.

The healthcare system in the region needed a more efficient way to upskill candidates from entry level to specialty nursing roles, so the Hospital Workforce Collaborative was organized by the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation to address ongoing critical skill shortages. Nine hospitals in the Phoenix area used the TPM model to identify their greatest pain points – developing and retaining nurses in six specialty practice areas – and develop a plan to address them. The collaborative of employers established a partnership with the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) to inform the curriculum of applicable nursing and healthcare programs within the district’s ten community colleges to meet the needs of the growing healthcare business community. The state of Arizona approved a $5.8 million budget request to expand nursing programs at the community colleges, specifically focused on upskilling existing employees. This unique approach to upskilling talent will deliver the workforce that the local economy needs.

The Kentucky Chamber created nine statewide collaboratives for the state’s most critical industries, including a second chance hiring program in equine that has received nationwide recognition. For many years, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce heard from its members that finding candidates with the right skills for their most critical jobs was becoming more and more challenging. This skills gap was damaging productivity, ballooning hiring costs and, in many cases, sacrificing economic growth opportunities as industry leaders couldn’t find the workforce needed to fill their current vacancies (let alone those needed to expand).

Building a workforce that meets employers’ needs now, and in the future, required direct input from employers on what critical positions they need to fill and what training or education is required to fill them. The state lacked a consistent method of bringing business, education, and workforce partners together to create and sustain the high-quality workforce needed for Kentucky’s continued economic prosperity.

To fill this gap, in 2018, the Kentucky Chamber Workforce Center launched “Building Kentucky’s Talent Pipeline,” a statewide movement with TPM at its core, to empower employers to lead workforce development in Kentucky. In partnership with the Kentucky Cabinet for Education and Workforce Development, the goal was to create and support at least 20 employer collaboratives across the state focused on building a talent pipeline for 60 critical jobs in key sectors: healthcare, manufacturing, construction, logistics, and business services/IT by July 2020.

This statewide implementation of TPM prioritized training nearly 40 carefully selected community leaders to identify the areas of greatest need and to convene industry leaders at the local and regional levels. In addition, the Kentucky Chamber Workforce Center hired a team of project managers tasked with managing and coordinating the day-to-day operations of TPM while aligning local efforts to the state vision. The result was a grassroots effort of communities convening industry collaboratives locally while guided and supported by state partners.

Building on its success and previous goal of establishing 20 employer collaboratives, in 2020, the Chamber escalated its goals to 25 collaboratives, with a sharp focus on creating solutions to ensure Kentuckians are trained, developed, and upskilled in the career pathways most needed to support Kentucky’s economy. That same year, the Kentucky Chamber partnered with the Kentucky Community and Technical College System to educate an additional 40 Kentuckians, enabling more provider partners with the skills and knowledge on chain solutions from their vantage point.

Similarly, the Greater Waco Chamber is customizing the TPM process to serve Greater Waco’s business community. In this issue, you will learn how the Greater Waco Chamber is utilizing a collaborative communication loop to align resources and develop an action plan for Greater Waco.