A Different Perspective on Jobs

Just got home from a planning meeting of the Community Services Board (CSB), the “there's one in every county” organization that oversees mental health services, addiction services, and services to developmentally delayed individuals in Otsego County. I find this stuff fascinating and very important, and am happy to have been assigned as the County Board liaison to the CSB for each of my six years here.

The meeting was great – it was a vision and mission and goals kind of meeting; we began what will be a long conversation about issues and priorities and goals for the CSB and subcommittees in a wide variety of areas.

One of the areas was workforce development. Pat Knuth, Director of ARC Otsego, is on the CSB, and once again expressed their difficulties in obtaining and keeping staff. This is also an issue for Springbrook, one of the biggest employers in the County. I immediately thought of one of the priorities of the Otsego County Strategic Plan, which called for some kind of community college – not a bricks and mortar affair, as I think I've noted previously, but a more innovative approach to needs which are clearly and accurately identified in Otsego County.

Our conversation today was, I hope, the initial stage of further collaboration in the work of creating an institution which will reach out to High School students and High School, non-college graduates, beginning with marketing the direct-care field, then offering training, and finally providing incentives to work at local facilities and stay here for 'x' number of years.

That's a long way off. But it's important to know that, in all the noise about creating jobs, Otsego County is flooded with full time jobs with benefits which are not being filled. In a major occupational field, we don't have a jobs problem, we have jobs that go begging for lack of applicants.

Training is not the only reason for this situation – housing, pay scale, advancement, and other issues are also at play – but it is very important for us to keep this in mind whenever we talk about economic development or jobs. We've got jobs that go begging, and we need to figure out how to fill them with our young people, and how to encourage them to make a career here in Otsego County.