119K Commission Holds Final Public Forum In New London

by Brian Scott-Smith CTNewsJunkie

NEW LONDON, CT – Over the course of a four-hour meeting at City Hall on Tuesday, the 119K Commission along with panelists, industry experts, and mayors from around the state talked through the state’s workforce development problems, and how to reconnect the 119,000 disconnected youth to education and the economy.
The discussion focused on post-secondary educational pathways, employment support, and other wraparound services with an emphasis on employers needing to embrace radical changes in how they engage with potential hires, and how locate the skills and qualifications they need to fill their jobs. The state has over 90,000 job openings at the moment.
New London Mayor Mike Passero opened the meeting by reiterating the mission of the 119K Commission, “to get 60,000 of our approximately 119,000 disconnected youth back on track. And we are committed as a commission not to create a report that is then put on a shelf. We are committed to creating a strategy that we can immediately implement.”

Canterbury First Selectman Chris Lippke, a commission member, reminded the group that certain parts of the state are more impacted than others, so there will be a need to lean on multiple agencies to help carry out the work that is needed to be done.
“For our region, we are the most impacted and the least prepared. We have the smallest towns, and we don’t have the bandwidth or capacity to take on this work by ourselves,” Lippke said. “So, we’re going to be relying on social services, the Access agencies, United way just to name a few to work with us … Not one of our small towns is capable of taking this on so we will have to work as a region to pull this off.”
The first of two panels addressed the question of needs and opportunities in the labor market and how employers could successfully recruit, hire, and train young adults who are currently disconnected from the workforce.

Paul Mounds, the former chief of staff for Gov. Ned Lamont who is now with Yale New Haven Health, said his organization is the largest non-public employer in the state with around 30,000 employees. He said their biggest hurdle is that people think there is a shortage of jobs in the healthcare sector when Yale has a wide range of other jobs at all levels that they are struggling to fill.
“If you go to Yale New Haven Health’s website there are 1,556 jobs that are currently posted, and many of those jobs only ask for a high school degree or GED equivalent,” Mounds said.
Mounds added that according to the Dalio Report, many of the 119,000 disconnected youth only have a high school degree or GED, and Yale New Haven Health sees their responsibility as an employer to seek out these potential employees. He said they have and continue to do so in cities like New London, New Haven, and Bridgeport, where they are among the top employers.

Chris DiPentima of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA) spelled out the current state of the labor force here, saying that while Connecticut has reached a new peak for total private-sector workers, the real issue, he said was, “we’re not keeping up with demand. If we had zero percent unemployment in Connecticut today, everyone looking for work had a job, we’d still have more than 30,000 job openings in the state.”
DiPentima said this was an opportunity for disconnected youth to address the state’s workforce crisis, but he added that Connecticut is a highly educated state in which almost 25% of the workforce has graduate degrees, and another 25% has bachelor’s degrees.
“The job openings are primarily in no education- or high-school-GED-equivalent or some college-level certification program,” he said. “More than 50% of the 9,000 manufacturing jobs in Connecticut require a high-school degree. We’re over-educating our population when the jobs don’t require that. And I think that’s one of the biggest disconnects.”

DiPentima said that because of this, employers have just started to move toward skills-based hiring instead, as around 60% of the population is currently excluded from many jobs because they don’t meet the educational or qualification requirements.

The first panel L to R: Steve Sigel, Garde Arts Center, Paul Mounds Jr., Yale New Haven Health, and Chris DiPentima of CBIA. Credit: Brian Scott-Smith / for CTNewsJunkie

He also added that although Connecticut has many Fortune 500 companies in the state, the vast majority of businesses are small- to medium-sized with an average of nine employees who are just trying to stay in business in order to keep the lights on.
The CBIA, he said, is trying to educate smaller employers to look at skills-based hiring to help them close the unemployment gaps in the state.

The second panel consisted of Paul Lavoie, the state’s Chief Manufacturing Officer, Mike Nogelo, President of the Eastern Connecticut Workforce Investment Board (EWIB), and Shannon Marimon, Executive Director of Ready CT. They discussed what the state could do to help disconnected youth thrive in the labor market.
Lavoie said the state has gotten good at developing people, but the disconnect still remains between the industry and jobs despite there being an abundance of manufacturing jobs available across the state.
Nogelo backed up Lavoie’s claims, telling the commission about their success placing 1,675 young people into employment after completing on-job training with Electric Boat, which makes submarines in Groton using their manufacturing pipeline initiative.

Nogelo said the state has to continue to support and expand alternative routes to employment and careers other than further or higher education, which isn’t for everyone.
But that comes at a cost to the state and the panelists told the commission that one of those pathways, known as “career connect,” which helps provide free training for high-demand jobs in Connecticut, has helped many people. However he said its state funding is due to end soon, although the legislature promised to look at extending the program for another year.
Marimon’s organization embeds teams into schools to deliver work-based learning opportunities so that classroom instruction is made relevant to career possibilities. She said the way the state budget allocates funding is part of the problem because it breeds uncertainty.
“The timeline for the release of those funds is terrible,” she said. “Typically, the largest amount of money is approved by the Appropriations Committee and it’s usually not finalized until the last day of session. So, in a biennial year when a budget is being approved for July 1 of that year, you’re finding out June 8th how much money you have to work with for July 1. And then you have to rush to find the students to fill the internships with.”
Marimon said the delay causes them problems as they have to recruit students before they know what money is available to them. If they recruit too many, they then have to turn students away or leave money on the table.
She asked the commission to consider this type of funding situation when they prepare their report.
During the public comment section of the meeting seventeen people spoke, ranging from businesses and agencies who discussed how they were implementing programs and ways of working to help with the current situation.
A formerly incarcerated individual spoke of his 20 years in prison and how since being released he has made a new life and career for himself. He said the commission needs to make sure that their strategy also looked at this part of society, as many disconnected youths get caught in similar situations. He added that employers and the state need to recognize and implement second-chance programs and not discount that individual based on their »history.
And Shineika Fareus, executive director of the Connecticut Black and Brown Student Union, reminded the commission that the conversation was about young people yet, as she looked around, there were hardly any in the audience. Why were they discussing their futures without them?
She also warned about putting young people into low-paid jobs just to fill numbers, jobs that may have no promotion prospects, or they get injured at work and can’t continue, but they also can’t go back to school to better themselves, saying it’s a cycle they’ve seen before and could easily happen again.
Closing out meeting – which is the final regularly scheduled meeting of the commission – Andrew Ferguson, of Dalio Education and co-chair commission, said the report will provide answers.
“What will it take for our young people to thrive?” he said. “We intend for this strategy to put forward an honest answer to that question. It’s not going to be a perfect answer. It’s not going to be everything myself or the commissioners wanted.”
Ferguson asked everyone at the meeting to take the report, when it’s done, and to raise awareness around it. “The common truth is there are many different programs and strategies and initiatives we can all do, but the common thing is that we all require to care a bit more than we did today and we prioritize these issues in the state a bit more than we have, to work a bit differently together, to collaborate. That’s what it’s going to take.”
He added that people can still submit testimony and information to the commission as they deliberate on the final report.People can do that by sending it via the commission website: http://www.119kcommission.org