Workforce Q&A with Kim Becicka

Kim Becicka, the recently-retired vice president of continuing education and training services at Kirkwood Community College, participated in a question-and-answer session with Corridor Business Journal CEO John Lohman at the Workforce Leaders All-Stars event Sept. 22 at The Hotel at Kirkwood. Here, in lightly edited form, are a few of the questions and answers from that Q&A. Q: As a scholar in workforce education, looking in the past, is there a precedent for how things are going now? A: There are components of this recession that are similar to other recessions. However, this is drastically different from a workforce development standpoint, because it's so complex due to the pandemic. Prior to that, we certainly were having skills mismatch concerns from employers, but you still were getting a nice size applicant pool. Now we're dealing with a much more drastic workforce shortage. Nationally, we have about a million people that aren't even looking (for jobs) anymore, whether that's because of the impact of the pandemic and life changes, or because people are applying and not getting jobs, so they’re giving up. The pandemic has also caused individuals to reassess. 66% of individuals impacted by the pandemic considered changing the current industry they were working in, moving out of the workforce and staying home, or starting a new business. 2000 was a slider recession, more of an issue of churning. In 2008 and 2010 we had some massive job losses, particularly in manufacturing. Whether we like it or not, employees in this recession are in the driver's seat. Q: When you look out a year or two, are things going to get better? A: We’re in for the long term with this worker shortage, in some regard due to our population issues. Our population is continuing to grow, but we have shed a lot of people available to work due to this reassessment. We don't know what's to come, which puts pressure on the decisions we're trying to make right now. We do have an unemployed and underemployed workforce that is looking for work. That might be a shorter term solution to help gain some scalable momentum in workforce candidates, but that will only come with new ways of approaching and strategizing to that audience. In the shorter term as organizations, many of you may want to look at your timeframes, how you’re communicating the skills of your positions, even the speed at which you call people back who have the skills you're looking for. I just heard (about a company) that interviewed five candidates. The first offer already had a job. Three called and said they were dropping out because they had a job. The second offer just got a job. So they lost five good candidates because of the time it took them to get to a decision. Now more than ever, time is of the essence. Q: Can you talk about a couple of your biggest successes? A: The two programs that I'm most proud of are our GAP and Pathways programs. Many years ago at Kirkwood we designed what we called the GAP Tuition Assistance Program. GAP provides tuition assistance to individuals in short-term training programs. Those programs are not eligible for federal financial aid, so you can imagine that it's really hard for individuals to come up with that tuition money. We got approval to invest some money in that fund, and it was very successful. We did research and we knew enrollment completion rates, employment and wage gains after short-term training were very high. I'm also proud it was addressing some of our equity gaps. While there still was a difference in completion and wage rates between Caucasians and people of color, they were not as far apart as many other programs. We still have work to do, but it was showing gains. We wrote legislation and got support from all community colleges, and it’s now available in any community college in Iowa, with $3 million of funding. The other program was as a result of our research on Pathways and the I-BEST (Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training) model from Washington State in higher ed, researching what's working and determining if it's a match and how you change it to meet your demographics. Pathways is different in that it also provides not only tuition assistance, but wraparound supports (like) child care, transportation, PPE, testing needs, books. And it involved a model of intrusive advising, an interview process to assess if individuals were at a stable enough point to be able to be successful in education, and if not, we worked with service providers to help them in areas they needed to get more stable. That also had a really good outcome. Q: Why is it so hard for us to act like a region? A: Regionalism is difficult, and it’s not. Individual identities of organizations that are part of the success of a regional development strategy have to be brought in. But I believe regionalism can’t take over the individual organizations, because local entities receive a variety of funding that comes with rules, and that can be a concern about tying into a regional strategy if that organization can't make that work with the outcomes demanded by their funding stream – not just state or federal allocations or grants, but investors. I don't know that we have an economy of scale with our investors or funders (who) understand that larger investment in regional economic development. I think regionalism for workforce development is doable, and we've been doing that, but I’m very excited about the opportunity to see planning processes that can permit us to work even more closely together. I think we'll get there on workforce development. To help us get regional economic development, we’ve got to address the funding issue, if we want a marquee umbrella organization that can also allow local organizations to exist.