Workforce Summit addresses needed skills, education of future workforce in Central Louisiana

Employers and educators learned about resources available from the Cenla Work Ready Network to get a skilled and educated workforce needed to the meet economic needs of area employers at the Workforce Summit held Wednesday in Alexandria.

Resources available from the Cenla Work Ready Network help employers hire “smart” which in turn helps lower turnover and safety issues and helps them select the right employees to get the return investment out of the money used to train them, according to a handout from the summit.

“The goal of the Cenla Work Ready Network is to produce a credentialed workforce, and to do that we provide the WorkKeys assessment, which if you are successful in taking those assessments, you earn a nationally recognized, affordable credential which is called the National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC). So that's our goal is to credential everyone in Central Louisiana in our 10 parishes through this network,” said Dr. Marjorie Taylor, executive director of The Orchard Foundation, which along with The Rapides Foundation and Louisiana Central sponsored the event.

To date they have awarded 59,000 NRCRs.

For the past 12 years, the network has been using ACT WorkForce suite of products like the ACT WorkKeys Solutions at high schools across the 10-parish region. Their services are also available to adults looking for employment, added Taylor.

“It allows us to be what's called an ACT Work Ready Community,” said Lafe Jones, vice president of Louisiana Central, the area’s regional economic development organization.  “What that measures is work readiness for different types of jobs that have been matched to job descriptions and skill sets. It allows for a credentialed workforce to be out there for our employers, and to have as a hiring tool, this free assessment to know if this person is the right match, if there's an opportunity for this person to advance, if they if they just seem to be a good fit for the organization. It's not the only thing to look at, but it's a real important thing.”

Since the network has been in place for a while, Taylor said what they wanted to do now was reenergize the community around the effort, especially employers.

"Our efforts are for naught if our employer community doesn't recognize the value of the credential and use it in their hiring processes,” she said. “So we have a lot of employer supporters already, but it’s just time to renew that energy around efforts."

“We’re getting ready to address all the workforce development shortages that we have. We’ve been looking at where students can stay in this community and get a good job and have a career,” said Dr. Paul Coriel, chancellor at LSUA. “Any connection we can have with workforce development and business owners helps us make sure we’re doing what we’re doing in terms of the courses we’re offering, the degrees we’re offering. Alignment of the university and students are crucial, and these meetings help us fine tune that goal.”

The summit gave employers and educators a chance to hear from regional employer advocates and some from neighboring states to get ideas on what they can do to expand what they are already doing, said Taylor.

She pointed to two local companies, RoyOMartin and Gilchrist Construction company, which are NCRC champions.

“When we launched the Cenla Work Ready Network, they were the first to come on board and use the credential in their hiring process,” said Taylor. “There are different levels of employer participation. We have what we call our supporters who recognize the credential meaning that they know what it is and they understand the value of it. And then we have a deeper level of commitment which are those employers that actually require the credential.”

There are hundreds of employers across their 10-parish area that value the credential and signed on as employer supporters, she said.

“But we just need more. We need everybody that does any type of hiring to be involved in the work or any network,” said Taylor.

Gilchrist was an early adopter of the ACT WorkKeys, said Valerie Aymond, chief resource officer. They implemented it into their business in 2010 and they have seen the benefits.

Their turnover rate was 100 percent so it was really expensive to do business, she said. So they took a test group of 75 people and implemented the WorkKeys for nine months.

“At the end of 9 months, 10 months, almost a year, we had a 75 percent retention rate, more or less. So, we kept those people," said Aymond. "And then we were going through a transition in our safety culture, so this was unexpected. When we increased the quality of our hire, through using the NCRC, our safety trends started to improve.”

They fully implemented the WorkKeys in 2011. She said they assessed anyone who worked for them and it became a requirement to work for Gilchrist. If they didn’t earn a certificate, they had a program for remediation to get them there.

“We use it for training and development to put the right people in the right training programs. Our promotion rate went from 13 percent to 30 percent in a couple of years because we made sure we had right people in the right training programs. It’s phenomenal,” she said.

Their promotional trend is consistently staying in the 30 percentile range, which means people are moving up and earning more money, said Aymond.

Since implementing WorkKeys, they have seen a significant decrease in turnover and their reportable incident rate, she said. Overall they had 59 percent decrease in the number of incidents and accidents over a year after implementation. They also had a 54 percent decrease in the recordable incident rate which are serious injuries where someone can’t work or are restricted.

"That’s how it started. We’ve just held the course for about 12 years now. We are an NCRC employer advocate. So anybody that comes to work for us, it’s a prerequisite to earn a WorkKeys credential,” said Aymond.

The ACT did a case study on the first 75 people that Gilchrist trained. The company won a national award, the first in the history of the company, for their work in the program, said Aymond.

This article originally appeared on Alexandria Town Talk: Workforce Summit addresses how skills, education can be provided for future workforce