December 2007
Workforce Development and Basketball Should Have More In Common Than They Do
Commentary by Jim LeMaster, President and CEO, Kentucky Association of Manufacturers
What do basketball in Kentucky and workforce development have in common? Many of you would say, “Not much,” considering the rich basketball tradition we have here in the Commonwealth compared to challenges in preparing our population for well-paying jobs.
But they should have a lot in common, such as every year setting aggressive goals and expectations that cause you to creatively use “out of the box” strategies to achieve them.
I’m sure Billy Gillispie, Rick Pitino, and other Kentucky coaches never begin a season wanting to just have a winning season. They want to win it all…either a conference championship or, in some cases, another state or national championship.
So why is it that some teams either achieve, or come close to achieving, their goals, but others never come close?
The answer is incremental thinking, the kiss of death to all things great and worth doing.
When you think about great achievements of mankind, or even in the lives of your friends, family or yourself, I doubt much would have happened if those involved in setting goals or developing strategy were incremental thinkers. You know, the types who are content to shuffle paper, attend meetings or write reports.
The problem with incremental thinking is that it doesn’t stimulate creative, out-of-the-box solutions to problems and challenges. Looking back through the years, the University of Kentucky or the University of Louisville may not have won national championships as often as they did if coaches and players hadn’t set that goal at the beginning of the season.
Yet, Kentucky now finds itself in a similar spot, although something far more important than winning a national championship is at risk: our future economic prosperity. We are at a philosophical crossroads where the power of large, visionary, aggressive goals must overcome the sluggish force of incremental thinking and the tiny goals that go along with it.
This analogy could apply to several challenges across Kentucky, but none is more critical than the looming crisis we may soon face in the workforce development-education arena unless we take action now and act quickly.
I recently attended a State Chamber education forum event in Lexington that was attended by a number of well-known and highly respected education, government, civic and business leaders. A research company presented data that compared the performance of Kentucky’s educational system with other states. Various speakers debated ideas on how to solve the challenges.
But what wasn’t discussed until someone posed the question is, “What about those Kentuckians who don’t attend a four-year college but still want good jobs that fund a middle-class lifestyle?”
The manufacturing sector, which by a more than two-to-one margin is Kentucky’s number one economic engine, has those jobs. Most average from $35,000-$45,000 in annual salary and include a good benefits package. But according to recent surveys, many Kentucky manufacturers are finding it more difficult to find job applicants who have at least graduated from high school, know how to do simple math, read, write, work in teams and show up for work sober, on time and with the right attitude.
Kentucky’s nationally renowned community college system (KCTCS) waits for those who want to make $60,000 or more by learning a skilled trade.
Part of the problem for manufacturing is that it’s unfairly saddled with an image that long ago should have been transformed by a decent public relations effort. Long gone are the boring, monotonous factories of our grandfathers’ day. The modern manufacturing environment is exciting…marked by a team-sport atmosphere in which smart, cool-looking people get to run million-dollar computerized robots, massive stamping machines and have the power to stop a whole production line if they see something that’s not right.
So ingrained is the old image of manufacturing that many parents, teachers and students themselves tend to believe careers that pay barely above minimum wage are more desirable than manufacturing. What we need is a new message…one that uses practical math: “How long will it take you to buy a shiny new Corvette, Toyota or Ford if you’re a) making $10 an hour in a service job or b) making $20 or more an hour in manufacturing?”
Pressuring the other end of the workforce development crisis are the thousands of Baby Boomers who will be retiring from Kentucky’s high-tech factories during the next five or 10 years. Who’s going to replace them? If Johnnie or Sally can’t do math, it won’t be him or her.
Kentucky’s long-term economic life is at stake unless we set ambitious goals for workforce development and develop the creative, aggressive strategies to achieve them. Most importantly, the strategies need to include educating parents, educators and students about the benefits of working in manufacturing.
At the State Chamber forum, someone opined that it “would take a generation” to achieve meaningful change. That’s too long for Kentucky manufacturers. As one plant manager said at a recent KAM meeting, “Unless some things change in the next five years, we may not be here.”
So manufacturers say, “Time’s up for changing Kentucky.” We can do it quickly if we simply follow the goal-setting lessons of some of our basketball coaches.
