Facilitator needed for pre-employment training

GRANT COUNTY - In considering where the Central Washington JOBS Project is going, its co-chairs shared where all it has been.

Co-chairs Allan Peterson and Jeni Billups addressed the Grant County Economic Development Council Thursday morning for the council's quarterly membership meeting at Big Bend Community College's ATEC Building.

Peterson provided a history of the group, from moments when it has struggled to find participation to the success of the "The Future Is Here" job fairs at Othello and Moses Lake high schools.

"Both in agriculture and industry, we don't want or really need just physical labor, we need labor that has some skills," Peterson said. "Economic growth with a no-skilled labor force, something really needed to be done."

Companies are stealing employees from their neighbors, Peterson noted, as employers contemplated how to recruit and retain employees possessing the necessary training.

"Ideally, you've got a situation where you have employers and they want this unlimited pool (of employees) to draw from," Peterson said. "Living on campus, I can tell you we've got students, professionally trained technical people, they want a pool of jobs to choose from."

Peterson likened the situation to employers who have the heart of creating businesses for somebody to work, and applicants breathing life into such places.

"Do you want your heart to pump or do you want your lungs to breathe?" he asked. "If we're going to be a sustainable community, we need to have both. This leads to survival."

At one point, Billups put up the notes from the project's original meeting in January 2007, the brainchild of longtime Grant County economic development leader Larry Peterson, when it was then called the operations task force.

The majority of the items called for at that time have been met since then, Billups reported, with the project addressing the last two items on the list: a certification program and short-term training needs.

Ohio-based speaker Kelly Wallace spoke to the group last week about a successful industry-led consortium to train and prepare employees for jobs necessary to area employers.

On the heels of Wallace's presentation, Billups said, she and other project members heard from local industry representatives who were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about creating such a pre-employment program in the Columbia Basin.

The next step, Billups said, would be bringing Wallace back for what she termed a "roll up your sleeves" workshop to identify the Columbia Basin region's objectives for such a program.

Billups said she believes industry could be asked to sponsor Wallace's return, but said she is hesitant about one aspect of such an undertaking.

"There is no way any one of us who is a co-chair at this moment has enough time to administer a program like this," she said.

Billups asked for people in the room to come forth with suggestions, noting she wasn't talking about grants. Industry members of the project don't want to be obligated to funding that tell them how to design programs until they know more about who and what they are.

"Right now, we're saying we want to be free agents because we don't know what this is going to look like and we don't want to be bound by any confines of grant dollars," she said. "We probably need a facilitator who is willing to give us 50 percent of their time to get a program like Kelly's launched here in the Basin."

Also during the quarterly meeting, council President Lynn Garza said the council will begin offering a monthly general membership meeting beginning Sept. 17, at which council members are encouraged to attend and find out what is happening throughout the county.

"It keeps you in communication with everybody," she said.

The meetings are held at the ATEC Building at 7 a.m. every third Wednesday of the month, Garza said.