Direct from Washington, November 2008

Green-Tech Employment

Perhaps it is never too late to plan ahead, even in the midst of a crisis. For example, a recent summit meeting in California focused on the “green-collar” labor shortage that already exists in that state. The shortage is not among college-educated engineers, according to officials of power companies and others, but among skilled workers such as those who can install solar panels. If schools do not start training young people for these kinds of jobs, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the green-tech industry will move elsewhere or import the technicians needed, they said.

While the presidential campaign rhetoric emphasized the potential job growth in a green economy, the proposed policies failed to create a new paradigm for workforce training, according to Julian Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center in New York City.

Current and proposed policies focus on workforce “training,” aimed at getting people a job with little attention to career advancement. The emphasis on low-level skills, he said in a commentary on the Huffington Post, has resulted in high-level-skills jobs going unfilled or, as Northeastern’s Andrew Sum pointed out in his testimony, employers seeking to hire non-native workers.

Federal policy makers, Alssid said, “have failed to recognize that while job training may have worked in the industrial economy, the knowledge economy requires a different approach that focuses on workforce development.” Moreover, federal funding for programs categorized as workforce development are spread throughout six agencies and received little attention from Congress in recent years.

Considering the severe constraints on the federal budget, the next Administration and Congress need to retool existing programs to be more efficient and to change them from training to development for a new economy, he said.