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.
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