1st quarter 2009

Economic Development 101:
Workforce role for recruiting business

Creating opportunities for new high-wage jobs is important to the long term health of any community. Having the ability to identify those opportunities depends upon many factors, such as the availability of skilled labor and the ability to provide effective and timely training. Even then, job creation requires the ability of the community to provide a sufficient number of qualified applicants.

When our community seeks to attract a new employer, we must understand the specific labor skills and specialties that will be required for that employer to be
successful. These skills may range from general laborer to more specific skills such as experience in machining, quality control or engineering. Other employers may seek
advanced computer technicians, software programmers and a host of degreed specialties and business services.

A prospective employer can not rely solely on the availability of a community’s unemployed to fill the jobs they plan to create. Available workforce goes well beyond
unemployed to include those that are in the workforce but underemployed, those that may be available to re-enter the workforce or are completing their schooling.

The community must be able to provide from five to 10 applicants for every job a new employer proposes to create. These are among the challenges that local economic development, workforce and education leaders must deal with daily.

A few years ago, the recruitment of Frontier Communications, now in DeLand, required the filling of nearly 500 new jobs. More than 30 different types of job classifications had to be filled, all with unique skill requirements.

To meet the need for applicants, Volusia County’s economic development, workforce teams and company personnel had to generate nearly 4,000 applicants for interviews—a ratio of eight applicants for every one position available.

Efforts to market these jobs included news media coverage, billboards, job fairs, e-mail marketing and newspaper ads over six months or more. More than 2,000 hours of technical community assistance was provided to support Frontier’s efforts to fill the jobs that were brought to the greater DeLand area.

The challenge to find 4,000 applicants took a significant effort by the community, especially in times of high employment. Without the community’s ability to convince a new employer that it has the type and number of qualified applicants, a company will disengage from discussions concerning relocating their business here.

This decision many times is made by a company before they even take the time to speak with community leaders or the technical personnel assigned to overcome these challenges. In today’s environment of computerization and access to electronic data bases, businesses and their site consultants can view hundreds of communities nationwide to meet the needs of an expansion or relocation. The ability to view communities electronically allows businesses to explore pre-set parameters for those communities that will meet specific targeted business needs. Labor and educational attainments are two of these parameters.

Volusia County is fortunate to have a workforce of 256,000.We are further fortunate to have five colleges and universities. Yet, the number of residents with college degrees that make up that workforce is only 19.9 percent. This compares with Seminole County at 33.3 percent, Orange County at 30.5 percent, and Brevard County at 26.2 percent.

This weakness in the number of workers with degrees has a direct and immediate impact on the type of companies that will consider a facility in Volusia County.
Many times our community is eliminated from consideration before we know we have been considered.

While this statistic does not impact all industry sectors, it does impact those segments of the business community that would allow us to be successful in recruiting larger office technology-based businesses such as those in the office parks of Lake Mary, Tampa, Jacksonville or the greater Orlando area.

The ability to attract office-based technologies requires a workforce with college
degrees and work experience in sufficient numbers to fill the ranks of jobs these types of employers bring. These are the types of jobs that help create the “creative class” of worker that can spark the revival of a community and add greatly to its attractiveness for other employers.

While statistically Volusia County does not fair well in being able to provide a growing
contingent of office technology workers, we do have the occasion to be competitive for such opportunities.

But even when we advance our competitiveness in this business sector, we are
challenged by the absence of existing larger office complexes suitable to meet the needs of employers looking to be in operation within 120 days or less. These challenges do not allow us time to build a suitable facility and, therefore, opportunities are lost.

Several examples over the past few years are testimony to these challenges. Ford Motor Company, Coca Cola, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and others have come close to committing to operational centers in our communities but for 60,000 to 80,000 square feet of existing and suitable office space, these opportunities and the more than 2,000 jobs that they represented were lost.

While office technology opportunities remain a challenge, Volusia County is an
attractive location for manufacturing. In designing marketing campaigns that target
specific industries or geographical areas of the country, the Volusia County Department of Economic Development attempts to leverage our community’s strengths.

The presence of medical product and automotive manufacturers gives our
community an advantage in these targeted industries. The community’s workforce
contains a high number of qualified and available workers to meet the needs of these
employers.

To succeed in the future, Volusia County must continue to invest in education, training
and in infrastructure and physical locations to facilitate the needs of future employers and the jobs they will bring.