A Talented and Globally Competitive Workforce
At a Glance:
- Inventory, assess and disseminate opportunities for lifelong learning, and match this information to the jobs of the future;
- Expand the ability of Michigan workers left behind by the changes in our economy to obtain the additional education and skills training they need to reenter the work force.
- Encourage local community colleges and universities to partner with community-based venture capital funds to connect current students with the jobs in growth industries;
- Provide incentives for displaced workers to make the entrepreneurial leap to starting their own businesses, assisted with programs designed to foster an entrepreneurial culture in Michigan;
- Expand access to post-high school vocational education, training and apprenticeship opportunities to connect young people with rewarding careers;
- Recognize and reward individuals who are investing their time and energy into retraining themselves for the future;
- Increase mentoring and engagement of youth aimed at charting a course for their future; and
- Increase learning and training opportunities targeted at ensuring all Michigan job-seekers have a basic financial literacy.
Perhaps our system of ensuring workforce development was appropriate during the industrial age, but it is entirely wrong for the dynamic, fluid, volatile and changing nature of our globalized economy.
Rather than structuring our workforce development solely through individual employers, we need to establish and promote a vigorous system of lifelong learning. The current system where individual companies have a disincentive to train workers in a mobile workforce, and where workers left behind by globalization too often lack the skills to reenter the job market at a similar level, is bad for workers and businesses both. Moving to a comprehensive lifelong learning program would allow American workers to adapt to and even profit from the changes caused by globalization, and would ensure the development of a better educated, better trained workforce from which companies could draw. If, as research suggests, globalized companies will follow talent pools, this type of commitment to lifelong worker training and education is also a wise investment in the future competitiveness of our state and nation.
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