Conversation about education in Gaston County: Economic development perspective
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The Gazette sat down with Donny Hicks, executive director of the Gaston County Economic Development Commission, to find out more about how education plays a role in work world.
think it plays a huge role in economic development. If you look at recent site selection in corporate real estate executives, in a poll they’ll identify the labor force and the work force preparedness as one of the key factors in their site location decisions. So I think that it’s important for recruitment. It’s also important for existing companies who eventually have to retrain and replace workers and having a qualified work force that they can take in on entry level and then train for different jobs over time.
One is ‘What are the existing skills in the work force?’ Some things you can retrain people to do. Maybe they did one thing and you can retrain them to do something else if they have the basic skills. Some things are not easily retrained. You really don’t retrain somebody to be a tool and dye maker. Or a machinist. So if somebody has an automotive parts facility and they need machinists, typically they’re going to look for those skills already in the work force….
What do employers look for in education when considering where to put a business?
More and more manufacturers and businesses want people who can do a multitude of different skills.
Are Gaston County Schools teaching those skills?
I think they’ve addressed some of that in the Highland School of Technology. I think that the bigger concern I have is less about what the curriculum is, than trying as a community to get the dropout rate to be lowered. We have a substantial number of kids that drop out and when they do that it really limits their opportunity obviously to be trained or to be retrained in any type of company that might be here or anybody they might recruit.
Without the adequate basic skills in math and reading, it’s difficult to get for them to ever get the training and retraining they might need to get a good job. So I’m concerned about the dropout rate probably almost more so than anything else that’s going on in the schools because I think the graduates they’re producing are good students. But my bigger issue is more of a communitywide issue with ensuring that kids stay in school.
How much education did students need in the past in order to get a job?
A lot of the training and retraining that went on was almost learning by doing. You would go to work and somebody would show you how to do the job. They would show you how to fix a machine. Or you could just learn from the job over time. Things were not as automated, they weren’t computer-driven or have all the types of sophisticated controls on them that you could almost learn by doing over time or learn by watching.
And today that really doesn’t work. If you look at the companies that we recruit, they need somebody who can go and learn in a classroom setting. So that pre-supposes that you have enough math skills and enough reading skills and language skills to be able do that. In a lot of cases in the past, we’ve run into problems where people lacked the adequate basic skills to be able to go learn in that setting…. I think it’s critical that we now have more people who have those basic skills. That will include everything from reading, writing -and more so in the past - teamwork.
Who are today’s students competing with for jobs?
They’re really competing with a global work force. People locate facilities and businesses to make a profit. They may like the community. They may like the location. They may like a lot of different things about your community. But ultimately they locate there to make a profit. And so our challenge, not only as a county, as a state but to a large extent as a country is to create an environment in which companies can still locate in the states and still make a product and still make a profit.
These students are competing against software engineers in India. They’re competing against engineers in China. They’re competing really against the world and that competition is stiffening every year. And it is real competition. It’s not some version of ‘Well, someday we’ll be globalized.’ We really are today.
I think what will be different about the jobs of tomorrow are that they’ll change and involve much more rapidly than they have in the past. In the past, you’re thinking about getting a job and keeping that job for 10, 15, 20 years…. It’s harder to tell what those jobs may be, but I think with certainty you can say that those jobs will change much more rapidly and that you’ll probably have more careers in your working life than you had in the past…
I think technical careers are going to be very much in demand. We’re probably going to have a shortage of a lot of different types of people - potentially nursing, engineering and all types of technical fields.
Tags: china, curriculum, dropout rate, education, graduates, job, jobs, unity