Beginning today, SkillSmart’s Insight construction compliance tracking and reporting platform will integrate BIM 360^®, a construction management software part of Autodesk Construction Cloud™.

This seamless integration enables joint customers to stay informed about on-site construction progress and make critical project management decisions with real-time data, including diversity and inclusion data points. With the simple addition of a Partner Card to BIM 360’s Project Home dashboard, customers can view InSight’s regularly updated workforce, vendor, and key performance metric data directly on their project management home-base.

InSight’s best-in-class collection, monitoring and reporting technology empowers users to collect critical data – such as labor hours, payroll, diverse and local workforce utilization, contractor wages rates, MBE participation, and supplier tracking – and track the insights and stories needed to remain competitive. By adding the SkillSmart InSight Partner Card to BIM 360, project teams can reduce their administrative work, improve project management decision making, and enhance communication with their clients and stakeholders.

“We are excited to partner with Autodesk Construction Cloud to address one of the most significant challenges facing the construction and infrastructure industry today,” said Jason Green, Co-Founder of SkillSmart. “We believe for the industry to remain relevant and grow, it must demonstrate its impact on local communities. This integration allows joint customers to receive key real-time data on critical metrics to meet specific compliance requirements, and also to set goals, measure progress and demonstrate the economic impact of projects.”

“Construction teams today collect a wealth of data in their digital solutions,” said James Cook, head of integrations at Autodesk Construction Solutions. “By leveraging that data to make informed decisions, teams can yield significantly more productivity. With the addition of the InSight Partner Card, our customers can monitor SkillSmart’s compliance & reporting information alongside the critical building data in BIM 360 for a holistic view of their projects.”

Customers can simply add the SkillSmart Partner Card to their BIM 360 Project Home dashboard by following these steps.

SkillSmart, with its comprehensive solution, is helping project owners, developers, and general contractors across the country collect, monitor, and report data in a new way to move beyond just compliance.  Businesses and the people who employ them are the cornerstones of healthy communities. Skillsmart’s InSight platform is the new platform for compliance tracking of subcontractors, data reports to local governments, and employee tracking during construction projects to ensure local and diverse resources participate in economic development.

First published by HR Dive, December 04, 2018. 

The market will leave behind those who think continuous learning is anything but a necessity, various experts say.

In elementary school, students are told what they need to learn. In high school, they receive some choices with electives. In college, students take full ownership of their learning and choose the path to their career. In today’s continuously changing work landscape, employees need to retake ownership of learning to advance (or even retain) their careers — and employers have to enable them.

The market will leave behind those who think continuous learning is an option rather than a necessity. For businesses that don’t stress the need for upskilling, and employees who don’t heed that warning, current projections show that almost every type of job could be replaced by the digital revolution. Getting employees to take ownership of their own learning and growth is critical to future-proof them and their employers.

The growing gap
A recent survey by Udemy, the 2018 Skills Gap Report, outlines the problem. Of over 1,000 workers, 84% said they believe there is a skills gap and 39% report to feeling its effects. In turn, workers are beginning to make demands; 51% said they would quit a job that didn’t provide needed training. Udemy’s head of L&D, Shelley Osborne told HR Dive that the challenge for business is not just giving workers a reason not to leave — they have to give them a reason to stay.

“People are more motivated to upskill on their own when there are learning opportunities that fit in their own time and at their own pace,” Osborne said in an email. Today’s learning tech supports can help provide a flexible, low-pressure environment. She recommended organizations integrate online courses into their L&D to create these opportunities for staff.

“When employees, particularly the millennial and Gen Z cohorts, better understand potential career pathways and the necessary steps for advancement, they can take more ownership for their learning,” Mike Knapp, CEO and co-founder of SkillSmart, told HR Dive in an email. He said he believes employers should take a more skills-based approach to talent development, with transparency that allows employers to better clarify the skills for each job type, as well as make opportunities for learning and development more accessible. Clarifying what is needed keeps employers and staff from wasting time and resources that won’t provide the skills needed to advance.

Employees want a return on their investment; when training makes their job easier, or puts advancement closer in reach, they’re motivated to own their continuous learning. Learning that isn’t demonstrably relevant can discourage and demotivate, wasting time and stifling growth.

Prioritizing learning
Businesses that stress the need for upskilling will need to walk the walk and the talk the talk. Companies must not only determine what skills are needed but also provide time and space. Osborne said she believes businesses should regard learning as part of their employees’ regular workload, the same way they expect people to be able to balance meetings, off-sites, and other team activities with individual responsibilities and deliverables.

“No one knows better than employees themselves what skills they need to learn right now in order to do their jobs better,” she said, “and they should be given free rein to pursue those topics.”

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First published by Crain’s Detroit Business, September 12, 2018. 

The Detroit Pistons and partners building the team’s new headquarters and practice facility in the city’s New Center area have launched a jobs portal to help meet a hiring quota.

The Platform LLC, the developer, and Christman-Brinker, the construction manager, joined the Pistons in rolling out the hiring system through Skillsmart Inc., a skills-matching website based in Germantown, Md. Officials behind the project hope the workforce development system will help contractors fill more than half of construction jobs with Detroit residents.

Construction of the $65 million Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center is part of an agreement between the city of Detroit and Pistons owner Tom Gores to move the NBA team from Auburn Hills to Little Caesars Arena downtown.

Job seekers can visit the website to build a profile that details their work history and skills, where they can see how their experiences match up to available positions. The site also directs visitors to free job training programs through the city’s Detroit At Work.

Pistons Vice Chairman Arn Tellem said the technology targets Detroiters and would develop a pool of talent.

“Using SkillSmart will not only align Detroit job seekers with available positions at the new performance center site, but create a more qualified pipeline of potential employees that will be mutually beneficial for job seekers and employers throughout the coming years as additional construction projects begin throughout the city of Detroit,” he said in a news release.

As part of the Pistons’ 10-point community benefits agreement with the city, the team also donated $100,000 to the Detroit Employment Solutions Corp. to improve skilled trades training at Randolph Career Technical center, a trade school within the Detroit Public Schools Community District.

It is not clear how many construction jobs would be created through the Henry Ford-Detroit Pistons project. A project manager with Christman-Brinker could not be immediately reached for more details Wednesday.

Construction of the 175,000-square-foot facility began in October and foundation work, concrete basement walls and underground utilities have been built, the release said. The facility is expected to open next summer.

The Skillsmart system will offer jobs throughout the construction process and is open to non-Detroit residents as well, Pistons spokesman Kevin Grigg said.

Some large-scale development projects in Detroit have failed to meet the city’s requirement that 51 percent of construction jobs be filled by Detroit residents. Contractors have blamed a low supply of qualified Detroiters with skilled-trades training, which Pat Devlin of the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council said is difficult as numerous projects compete for a limited pool of workers.

Earlier this year, the city fined contractors more than $5 million following the construction of the $863 million Little Caesars Arena for failure to employ enough Detroiters. Detroit residents made up just one-quarter of work hours in construction of the stadium.

“[T]his benchmark becomes increasingly more difficult to reach today with so many projects currently competing for the same workforce,” Devlin, secretary treasurer of the MBCTC, said in the release. “The Detroit Pistons are being proactive in their approach to implement a workforce development platform” to hire qualified candidates and promote training programs.”

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First published by HR Dive, July 26, 2018. 

In 2013, Laszlo Bock, then senior vice president of people operations at Google, revealed to The New York Times in an interview something most businesses probably already knew: GPAs were “worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation.”

Five years later, many employers still rely on GPA to forecast success in the workplace.

A recent study by Kingsley Leadership Academy suggests only 12% of those surveyed at the C-suite level think grades are an important consideration when hiring new employees. But for new grads, GPA is overwhelmingly highlighted on the CV or resume. With few other selling points to offer, the inclusion can be demonstrative of their work ethic and commitment. And in some areas, like academia or finance, the data may be significant.

But in many cases, GPA may be a false indicator of potential success as well as a potential risk for discrimination. “Proxies — like degree credentials or minimum GPA’s — ineffectively evaluate talent and artificially cull the candidate pool,” Mike Knapp, CEO at SkillSmart, told HR Dive in an email. “Skills-based hiring is more efficient, less risky, and better suited to today’s skills economy than job boards or traditional resumes.”

As more workers pursue self-guided learning and online courses, the skills-based model will become even more relevant, and GPAs less so, he said.

New and recent grads

“We are still seeing candidates placing GPA on resumes,” Bill Kushner, manager, Administrative and Human Resources Direct Hire Division at the Addison Group, told HR Dive in an email. “That said, it is more prevalent in candidates with under 10 years of experience and with individuals that carry higher GPAs.”

How long candidates leave it on a resume depends entirely on your GPA, Kushner says. Candidates that had a GPA under 3.5 would likely not put it on a resume, while those with GPAs above 3.5 are more often recommended to keep it on the resume. Companies primarily within the financial services and professional services space place more emphasis on GPA than other industries, Kushner said.

“Skills acquired through hands-on projects, volunteerism, extracurricular activities, or internships/work experience are far more valuable indicators of the skills they would bring to the workplace — and not reflected in a GPA score,” Knapp said.

What are you doing with the data?

In the absence of other real indicators of an applicant’s skills and abilities, hiring managers often use the GPA as a proxy for the work skills they hope an applicant has acquired, Knapp said.

“Unfortunately, using the GPA as a screening method often takes qualified, skilled applicants out of the candidate pool,” Knapp added. “When employers rely on traditional — and often unnecessary — proxies like degree or GPA requirements, they shut out entire portions of the workforce from opportunity and limit their access to a skilled labor pool.”

He warned that at a time when there are more open jobs in the United States than people to fill them, these types of requirements can arbitrarily reduce the pool of applicants and may have a disproportionate impact on all protected classes.

Kushner suggests using GPA as a portion of the hiring equation, but not as the final determinant. “It is weighed in conjunction with the experience level of the candidate,” Kushner said. “Typically with candidates with only a year or two of experience, their GPA represents what most likely is their largest body of work to date, and as such, will be weighed more heavily than that of individuals with a few years of relevant experience.”

Potential pitfalls

GPA, like so many other “rules” for employment, could put businesses at risk.

“Scored tests have long been used by employers to make employment selection decisions, and have just as long been challenged by job applicants as having a discriminatory impact on protected classifications,” Allison Kahn, labor and employment attorney at Carlton Fields, told HR Dive in an email. “While GPAs are not a traditional scored test, this measure may also be subject to non-discrimination laws if used as selection criterion for a position.”

A claim must show statistical evidence that supports disparate impact, but there are defenses employers can make to protect their hiring policies and practices.”For example, employer proof that the selection procedure, like GPAs, is ‘job-related and consistent with business necessity’ may defeat employer liability, particularly where there is no less discriminatory alternative that would predict job performance,” Kahn said. The responsibility is on the employer to provide evidence that GPA is a business necessity to avoid liability.

Luckily, employers have a few resources available to analyze whether GPAs should be used as a selection criterion for a position. The EEOC has a fact sheet on Employment Tests and Selection procedures with best practices that may be useful for employers considering whether to rely on an applicants’ GPAs as selection criteria. The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP) for employers can also help determine if selection procedures are lawful under a disparate impact theory.

Hiring holistically

While companies may not yet be shying away from GPA, more are becoming focused on a holistic approach to a candidate’s background. Recruiters would be wise to consider GPA as only part of the equation, experts said; experience, education, and ability to learn new processes, concepts, and technology should round out the decision making process.

The Kingsley data reveals C-suite level managers defer to other traits in favor of GPA. Work ethic was cited by 60% of respondents, while 45% cited teamwork as the most important skills. Leadership ranked around 55% for professional services and manufacturing companies. And in large firms, grades were relied on only to determine where the candidate’s expertise lies. For leadership roles, the focus is on people management, creativity and cognitive flexibility.

For Kushner, GPA is a data point in a data series. Using only GPA, he says, “eliminates candidates that may have strong related or transferable experience that have the potential to make an immediate positive impact on the business.”

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First published by Walmart, March 22, 2018. 

Technology is quickly changing how we live our lives, helping to make so many things easier, cheaper and faster. It’s also changing the way we work. Research suggests that innovations like artificial intelligence have the potential to significantly shift what certain types of work look like in the future.

While these changes might cause some to worry, they also provide an incredible opportunity to help us work in ways we haven’t before. Imagine being able to match your unique skillsets, strengths, and personality in a way that helps you find the right job. Or learning new skills through an app or platform that performs as easily as social media does. Or technology that connects you directly to services that can help overcome specific career barriers.

Helping bring technologies like these to life is exactly what the Employment Technology Fund (ETF) has set out to do.

Funded by the Walmart, Rockefeller, Joyce and W.K. Kellogg Foundations, the ETF invests in organizations and companies that have developed technology-enabled solutions that help workers overcome the barriers that often hold them back from advancing their skills, connecting to meaningful work and ultimately living up to their full potential. In doing so, the ETF strives to increase equal opportunities for millions of working adults – many of whom are women, minorities, and immigrants.

ETF’s latest social investments include Signal Vine, a company that uses text messaging to deliver highly personalized and interactive coaching to drive better behaviors and outcomes; SkillSmart, a skills-matching platform that increases transparency in the career development and job search process; and Nepris, a video-driven platform that provides teachers and students a way to connect with professionals around the world. These three companies exemplify a growing force of new entrepreneurs who share the belief that technology can drive social and economic progress.

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First published by MassLive, March 6, 2018. 

Springfield Works will use $75,000 it received last week from the state to expand efforts to mentor and guide job seekers all the way from initial assessment to employment.

Director Anne Shecrallah Kandilis said Springfield Works will also use the money to expand financial literacy programs aimed at easing the transition form public assistance to self-sufficiency in ways that keep folks from losing necessary services and benefits before they are really ready to go it alone.

The state awarded $500,000, including $75,000 to Springfield Works, through the Urban Agenda Grant Program designed to promote economic development in Massachusetts through the building of community partnerships in addressing obstacles to employment.

Springfield Works is part of the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts, and its aim is to simplify both the search for jobs and employers’ search for workers.

It uses SkillSmart, an online portal at springfieldworks.skillsmart, where job seekers can catalog their experience, education and work history, see what available jobs they qualify for and learn what training is available that they would need for open jobs. It’s the same online portal MGM Springfield is using to fill its 3,000 jobs. Employers and cities elsewhere also use SkillSmart.

Kandilis said SkillSmart is starting to catch on here even though she’s only got about 100 jobs listed thus far in addition to MGM.

“I have employers calling me every day,” she said. “So certainly the demand for the portal is really great.”

Kandilis said she has 320 job seekers signed up right now and she spent a recent day at the Springfield Public Library signing up more. MGM Springfield has a database of 8,000 job seekers.

“I want a thousand in our portal,” she said.

There are 43 separate agencies and organizations provide workforce training in the city and surrounding communities. Springfield Works’ job is give jobs seekers and those looking to hire one-stop-shopping.

“I think there is a disconnect,” Kandilis said. “Our job is to get people moving from program to program, step-by-step, and on to a job.”

The portal launched in October.

Just 58 percent of Springfield’s working-age population is working or looking for work, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Springfield Works received a $475,000 Working Cities Challenge grant through the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2016.

While directed at Springfield residents, the portal is open to any area job seeker or employer, Kandilis said.  

First published by MassLive, January 24, 2018. 

In Puerto Rico, Omyra Merced worked at several hotels planning events. “I worked in tourism and event planning, doing weddings and parties, things like that,” she said Wednesday. “After the hurricane, many of the hotels closed, so finding employment is difficult.”

Merced was one of a dozen Puerto Rican evacuees who attend an informational session at the MGM Career Center on East Columbus Avenue to fill out job applications.

“We’re here to talk about career opportunities that we can offer to those individuals displaced by the hurricane in Puerto Rico,” said Jason Randall, MGM Springfield‘s director of talent, acquisition and development. “We recognize that Puerto Rico does have a vast hospitality industry, including gaming and operations, and there are individuals who have backgrounds in these fields who are displaced in this area.”

With 3,000 jobs to fill at MGM, Randall is confident that some evacuees will have a chance at a new career and a new start in life.

“We will talk about jobs with anyone who wants to listen,” Randall said. “We are committed to 3,000 jobs, of which 80 percent are going to be full-time positions on property with us, so our goal in 2018 is to fill all of those positions.”

While the language barrier has been a major hurdle for many people seeking jobs, MGM has many employees fluent in Spanish. Several of them were on hand Wednesday to guide the applicants through the process of submitting their resumes and applying for jobs using the SkillSmart program available in the career center’s computer lab.

MGM Springfield is expected to open in September.

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First published by SHRM, November 7, 2017. 

A poor understanding of how job skills transfer among occupations—especially from occupations in decline to in-demand fields—is one of the biggest reasons for the nation’s skills gap. But employers and job seekers can identify similar skills for different jobs with tools that help recruiters expand their searches for qualified applicants and help workers move across occupations and industries.

“Most organizations haven’t quantified the skills they’re seeking, so if I haven’t articulated what I’m looking for, it becomes harder for me to look at a skill someone may have used in a different industry and see how that translates to the job I’m trying to fill,” said Mike Knapp, CEO and co-founder of SkillSmart, a job placement platform that connects employers, job seekers and educational partners to help close skills gaps. “Added to that, people haven’t quantified their own skills from previous jobs, so even if I knew what I’m looking for, how would I know that person had those skills?”

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is one place to start. O*NET is a continually updated database containing hundreds of distinguishing characteristics for almost 1,000 jobs across the U.S. economy. The information includes:

•  The knowledge, skills and abilities necessary to perform each job.
•  Occupational interests and work styles associated with each job.
•  Tasks and activities that make up job duties within each occupation.

“O*NET can be very useful for talent acquisition,” said Nicole Smith, a research professor and chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington, D.C. “I use it myself when searching for research assistants. My team will get together and decide what skills we need in order to complete a project. We go to O*NET to help us craft the job description because it provides the knowledge, skills and abilities one would use in that job.”

It’s also a great tool for determining skills overlap, she said. O*NET identifies similar required skills among different occupations, so people considering a career change can identify new opportunities and employers can feel more secure in widening their search parameters.

“You can line two occupations up and compare them for shared competencies,” Smith said. “Even if someone has trained for occupation A, they may have 90 percent of the competencies for occupation B.”

A 2017 New York Times review of the database showed how much overlap there is between seemingly dissimilar occupations. Service industry jobs, for example, require social skills and experience working with customers—abilities which also apply to sales jobs. The skills of tractor-trailer truck drivers are most aligned with jobs like rail yard and locomotive engineers and crane operators. Not surprisingly, payroll specialists’ skills match up with tax preparers, accountants, court clerks and legal secretaries. The article relates how a man laid off from oil production work couldn’t find a stable new job working in oil and gas. He was eventually hired by aerospace and defense firm Lockheed Martin for an advanced manufacturing job after a 16-week retraining course leveraged the mechanical aptitude and other skills he already had.

Work in Progress

But there are drawbacks to the O*NET database, according to experts. Knapp pointed out that the information—based on the government’s Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes, last updated in 2010—is out of date, and also doesn’t reflect how any particular employer defines the skills that make up their jobs. It is scheduled to be updated in 2018.

“The SOC codes are behind,” Smith agreed. “Every job is included in the database, but some will not have their own classification. For example, app programmers are included under the classification for software programmers. Cybersecurity professionals are subsumed under information security analysts.” If an employer wanted a breakdown of competencies for an app programmer, the skills for software programmers and other jobs under that classification would be included as well, she explained.

In addition, the tool can’t produce customized results for organizations looking to hire for specific skills. “Being an additive database, you end up with a compendium of all skills associated with a particular occupation, and not necessarily what an employer would be seeking to hire in any particular locality,” Knapp said.

SkillSmart takes a more tailored approach to match workers with employers in need, he explained. “Our sense was to go out and work with employers to see what they were hiring for at any given point in time and build an index of skills back that way.”

The idea is that skills for any particular job change over time as technology changes, and employers seeking to hire for the same occupation, even within the same industry, could be looking for slightly different things.

The problem is tellingly expressed by the example of a large hospital system in Maryland with a nursing shortage, Knapp said. “The nursing shortage is not unusual. But a university that is closely connected to that hospital trains nurses. The system doesn’t hire those nurses because they are not trained on what the hospital actually needs.”

SkillSmart breaks job seekers’ experience down into skills, and then assesses and designates a proficiency level for each applicant based on the skills an employer has identified. Applicants remain in the local talent pool and can later be pegged with the right set of skills for another job, even in an entirely different occupation. “We try not to leave any job seeker without a clear next step,” Knapp said. “Job seekers should have a clear understanding of what skills are in demand. And if they need additional education or training, they know precisely where to go.”

That’s because SkillSmart attempts to work with the local community—employers, educational institutions and workforce development programs—to develop learning opportunities to fill in skills gaps, highlighting another limitation of O*NET.

“While you have a clear idea that a certain skill is required for a particular job, the major shortcoming of O*NET is that it doesn’t provide information on how to attain those skills,” Smith said. “Without that, how can a curriculum be developed based on knowing a particular occupation uses certain skills? How can we develop a curriculum that translates that knowledge into learning a particular competency?”

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First published by Dusty Weis, Association of Equipment Manufacturers

At the urging of local officials, contractors on the $524 million project have approached hiring challenges with bold, unconventional workforce development strategies that help people get needed job training. Equipment manufacturers that struggle to find skilled workers could replicate these successful workforce development program models by utilizing new recruiting software that links applicants to needed training, partnering with local governments, connecting with the community and utilizing regional job training services.  

From a distance, it looks like any other large-scale work site. Newly-placed steel girders arch overhead as hundreds of yellow-vested workers swarm over the NBA’s newest arena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, still a year away from its completion in time for the 2018 basketball season.

But a closer look at the construction crews reveals a workforce made up of at least 40 percent Milwaukee residents who were, until recently, underemployed, jobless or even unskilled. These nontraditional work crews are gaining valuable on-the-job experience and providing for their families thanks to a partnership between the Bucks and the city of Milwaukee aimed at helping disadvantaged urban residents benefit from the city’s boom in downtown development.

In order to meet the city’s hiring requirements and qualify for public financing, Bucks Senior Vice President Alex Lasry says the organization and its contractors have had to implement a creative workforce development strategy template, employing unconventional recruitment efforts and even finding ways to train underqualified workers. But he says the benefits of putting local people to work on the project go beyond good corporate citizenship, and he sees lessons that other employers, including equipment manufacturers, could apply to their own hiring efforts in urban areas.

“There are qualified workers out there, and there are people who want to work that are out there,” Lasry says. “I think what separates us really was the outreach and the dedication we’ve had to making sure this was a top priority of the project.”

Workforce Development Program Models that Break the Cycle

This untapped labor pool starts just a dozen blocks to the north of the new arena, where people are buzzing over a different development. In the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood, a small supermarket has opened in what was once a boarded-up pharmacy, providing residents with convenient access to fresh fruits and vegetables for the first time in years.

In its subtlety, the transformation taking place in this historically African-American neighborhood contrasts with the $524 million arena and massive high-rises going up in downtown Milwaukee. But, in a zip code where the median household income hovers around $30,000 and unemployment is over 15 percent, the slower, more gradual improvements are no less important.

For decades, this and other Milwaukee neighborhoods have been mired in a cycle of poverty, where finding a job requires skills and experience, but skills and experience come from holding down a job.

“That cycle, sometimes it’s not just the economics,” says Alderwoman Milele Coggs, Bronzeville’s representative on Milwaukee’s city council. “It’s mental, too, it’s emotional. Once you’ve been caught in that cycle, you start asking, how many more jobs am I going to apply for and get denied?”

So when negotiations began over the incentives the city would offer the Bucks to build their new arena in Milwaukee, Coggs and her colleagues in city government saw an opportunity to help break that cycle. In exchange for city financing assistance, the Bucks would have to employ at least 40 percent of their construction workforce from the city’s Residents Preference Program (RPP), which maintains a list of unemployed and underemployed city residents.

“If we’re putting taxpayer dollars into a project, it just makes sense that the taxpayers should benefit from that project,” Alderwoman Coggs says.

On a project that will employ thousands of people across several years, Lasry says meeting the city’s 40 percent RPP requirement while staying on-time and on-budget is no simple task. “There are only so many qualified, experienced workers,” he says. “But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

To address the challenge, the team pledged $375,000 to workforce development and training efforts, and asked the city to make a matching pledge, launching a one-of-a-kind partnership.

“We weren’t going to BS around and hire people to just sweep floors or hold up a sign,” to meet the RPP goals, Lasry says.

Build-Your-Own Workforce

As the Bucks arena project was ramping up, another major addition to the Milwaukee skyline was winding down. At a price tag of $450 million, the new high-rise headquarters for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company employed more than 40 percent of its construction workers through the RPP—many of whom then joined the ranks of the Bucks arena workforce.

“I think that’s great,” Alderwoman Coggs says. “The point is not just to have people temporarily hired, but to give them the skills to get hired on an ongoing basis. Northwestern Mutual went above and beyond to ensure that they would meet and exceed those numbers.”

But other developments were tapping into Milwaukee’s RPP well of workers too, and, in order to meet their quota, Lasry says the Bucks had to build their own workforce through training and recruitment. Their first innovation was to employ a new piece of online software called SkillSmart Seeker, which helps create a path to employment for unqualified workers who would typically receive an outright rejection.

Lasry says all job applicants can apply via SkillSmart Seeker, which charts their qualifications and certifications. In cases where applicants come up short, SkillSmart Seeker creates a list of steps they can take to qualify for a job and connects them with resources to complete those steps, including local jobs training agencies, technical colleges and apprenticeships.

“We’re not telling anyone no,” Lasry says, “we’re just telling them not yet.”

“So many people may not have the proper certification, but they’re willing to get it,” Alderwoman Coggs says. “If they know what they need to do, they could go get qualified for future opportunities.”

And there will be many such opportunities. In addition to the arena, the basketball team is building or plans to build a practice facility, a sports clinic, an entertainment block, apartment buildings, parking garages and more. With 10 years’ worth of ancillary development in the works, Lasry says it will be to the team’s advantage to grow the pool of qualified workers.

So, with SkillSmart Seeker as a conduit for training new workers, Lasry and his team set about getting more people into that pipeline. Instead of a traditional job fair at the team’s headquarters, they offered opportunities directly to people in their own neighborhoods, holding “jobs town hall meetings” in nearly a dozen different parts of the city. Hundreds of Milwaukeeans turned out, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, and each was given an opportunity to sign up for SkillSmart Seeker and register for RPP on-site.

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First published by Jim Kinney at MASSLive.com, October 25, 2017. 

Baystate Health has 12,000 employees and makes about 1,400 new hires a year of folks from outside its system, said President and CEO Mark Keroack.

And as the city’s largest employer, Baystate’s gotten used to creating its own pipelines, or dedicated training programs to fill its need for workers, Keroack said.

That’s changing with Springfield Works and SkillSmart, an online portal for job seekers that tells them what skills they need for the job they want. It also helps them identify the skills they have already — either from school, the military or just from living their lives — and helps them find places that offer the training they need.

Baystate is one of 20 local employers that have posted a total of 100 jobs in the new SkillSmart portal, accessible at springfieldworks.skillsmart.us. It’s a project of Springfield Works and the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts. Springfield Works and the EDC rolled it out Wednesday with an event at the UMass Center at Springfield in Tower Square after 18 months of tinkering.

MGM Springfield already uses SkillSmart to evaluate job seekers for the roughly 3,00 jobs it pledged to create when its $960 million resort casino opens 11 months from now in September 2018.

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