Nebraska Economic and Demographic Data - Ernie Goss We economists thought that if you went below 6% unemployment rates, you’d have excessive inflation. Our economy has changed. Nebraska has the opportunity to take advantage this change. The number of farms is half as what there were 10 years ago. The farms today though are larger. Nebraska has unique challenges and unique opportunities.

I have a few slides here that show you several things, such as the difference between internet sales and retail sales, the increase of imports from China, decrease of US apparel employment, etc. How do we as educators, labor market folks and the rest help take this situation and turn it into an advantage for Nebraska. We need to have a barrier-free Nebraska. I hear complaints about the brain-drain but then I hear people say they want to obstruct immigrants. This is doesn’t work in Nebraska’s favor.

Young people want to leave everywhere, not just Nebraska, but also Georgia and New York. But we want to convince those who want to leave to come to Nebraska. Renewable energy, such as wind power and ethanol, might be an industry. Ethanol is not good for cattle farming but good for the energy industry. In the long term, there are some solid reasons that Nebraska could be a leader in this industry.

It seems that we’ll far outstrip the natural resources. We need o address the fact that supply will outstrip our demand at the present rate. Right now we have 12 ethanol plants in Nebraska. It’s pushing up the price of corn. In the long run, we need to think about not being corn based. There are other methodologies for ethanol productive. There is a farm that wants to move to Boyd County to take advantage of the gluten to feed the cattle. They’re running into obstacles because Boyd doesn’t want them to move there.

Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on the apparel industry. It seems that we’re talking through both sides of our mouths. The barrier created the inferior goods. I can see this situation in pharmaceuticals, but I can’t judge the quality, so in that industry I’d like to see more controls. The people who create barriers to import from barriers aren’t doing it because of the quality but to protect New York jobs.China has a car that sells for $5000. They’re probably some quality issues, but it removes the barriers from more people owning cars.

How do we address brain drain? I think students who are 22 years old can’t be appealed to. You could have them in Las Vegas and they’ll still say that the night life isn’t what they want it to be. I think you need to have different approaches to get a brain gain. Alternative energy sources, telecommunications are emerging industries in Nebraska.

Is it the job that brings people here?

Yes. If you have great jobs, they will come.

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Global Economic Change - Langdon Morris | Click here to download the PowerPoint Slides ( 2.4 megs) I’m one of the partners with InnovationLabs and have written a book on Permanent Innovation. What I’m going to share with you today comes from a 500-slide presentation. These slides will be on the website.

I want to talk about change on a global basis. I’m going to be using an example of the auto industry. The first slide includes a cartoon of the President of Ford who basically fired himself saying he couldn’t make the company better.

Ford and GM have reached the peak and they’re looking down and wondering what they can do. Japanese companies are already operating with a new model.

Have you heard of the Jobs Bank? These companies have people who show up to work to a building and sit for 8 hours with nothing to do. These companies have chosen to go over a cliff instead of collaborating.

You probably know that Toyota will surpass GM in the number of cars that they manufacture by 2008. Remember that the Taurus was the best selling car in 1996? Then they redesigned it. They killed the car. They achieved the opposite of what they wanted, which shows how poorly they understood the needs of their customers. It’s all about learning and knowing how to make innovative change.

Now I’d like to shift over to making change on a global basis. You’ll see a similar curve in a variety of statistics: Moore’s Law, the slope of carbon emissions, GDP, and others. You’ll see a logarithmic slope. That’s the nature of reality. You can see the flatter line which is our learning curve at a regular pace. The difference between the sharp slope and the learning curve is what I call it the change gap. That’s what we’re doing here. How can we bridge this gap to be successful?  A specific example of this is the S&P 500. In a few years only 125 of those companies will still exist. The rest will either die, merge, be acquired, whatever. This is called creative destruction. If you don’t adapt to it, you don’t survive. This is our challenge. Everything changes. And inevitably things will die.

• Comments: It would be interesting to see the trends of Nebraska mapped out against those curves.
• This is our technology curve and this is the education of the kids. We need to build these partnerships in order to close this gap.

Langdon: There are more students enrolled in corporate universities than in regular 4-year academic schools.

• We absolutely need those partnerships. We can’t keep up with you because we can’t keep up with the equipment base. We’ve got to have those partners.
• We don’t want to compete with the schools, we want to join with them. .
• We need to overcome the outside factors that prevent us to meet this curve. Whether it’s the parents or things like foreign languages.
• Other things include union agreements, expectations, and habits.
• We have to question our basic assumptions, such as a 9-month system. We need to blow that up.

Langdon: Relevancy will cure that.

Economic Development Goals and Initiatives - Caleb Pollard I’m going to give you a very quick overview and give you an idea of what we’re working on. I’m very new and come from a perspective that you may not expect.  I’m available any time you have questions, either now or after the session and have included my contact information in the slides I’m handing out.

I’m very passionate about Nebraska. Our challenge is migration out of the state. The workforce is going down considerably. It’s time we start addressing the situation now. You can see that people are aging.

How we’ve designed our solution is a marketing campaign. We want to provide a variety of entrepreneurial opportunities. I’m also working with people who are researching telecommuting. This will also relieve traffic congestion. We’re going to be looking at a marketing campaign. What drives people today? Money or lifestyle? I think of the choices, there is more emphasis on lifestyle and that’s going to drive our marketing efforts.

With housing, sometimes there are needs for a large workforce in places where there is not much housing. We’re looking to solve that.

I’m going to be focusing on Nebraskans who want to stay and Nebraskans who want to come back. We need to help people be aware that there are fantastic opportunities here and this is a fantastic place to live.

What are things you care about?

• We need a major airport
• Property taxes

We cannot address the tax structure. We’ll need to address that with our legislators.

• I’m not a native Nebraskan so I think you’re missing the boat by just focusing on that demographic.

We have to start somewhere because we have to get people here today, not tomorrow.

• I think we should have agricultural- and eco-tourism.

In order to understand the opportunities of the future, we have to ask some hard questions. Is it possible with the current structure to offer those things?

• What kind of impact has that study have on us? Study results show that there is a lot of interest in venture capital and that's something we should go after.

We’re 48th in the nation for economic development. What I’ve heard through the grapevine about venture capital gives me reason to believe that I don’t think that’s our way.

• What about young people interested in starting businesses?

What you’ll see is a shifting around the alignment in our department. This is a small piece of the pie. We need to emphasis the focus on Nebraskans. We need to have a people advantage. We need to grow the opportunities. We need to have micro-venture capital funds.

• I think you need to target the underserved population.
• I’d like to see focus on social entrepreneurisms, such as coffee houses and bowling clubs, which contribute to the lifestyle component.

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Workforce Development Goals and Initiatives - Joan Modrell    |  Click here for PPT presentation (212k) Welcome to the Workforce Development Tradeshow.

Let me share with you a few fast facts:

• 3% unemployment state
• As of 2nd quarter 2006, our vacancy rate is 3.7%.
• As of Monday, we were paying about 10,000 claims on unemployment insurance. About half of those are attached workers, which are short term employment

We have 45,000 employers in the state of Nebraska. There are 992,000 available workers with 962,000 of those currently working.

The workforce development system is governed by four boards

1. The Statewide Workforce Development Board
2. Tri-County Board
3. The Lincoln Board
4. One board representing the remaining counties in the state

Our Career Center has two customers: the employer and the job seeker.

Today the Labor Exchange is the main focus of our services. We served 84,000 unemployed residents last year. Of the people we serve 68% got jobs and 80% or those were retained after six months. We also focus on serving our veterans and are proud of the progress with that group.

We have an internet service that allows you to add jobs, or search for them 24/7. We have 4,970 active jobs in our online database and more than 25,000 user accounts that are using the electronic labor exchange.

We want you to use our labor exchange. As and employer, we can connect you with others. We can perform assessments for you like background checks. We have a career center and provide on-site services. Need customized training? We can provide that for you too.

Job seekers get a lot of benefit out of our electronic labor exchange as well. We can help find great matches for your skills and if you need to develop additional skills, we offer training opportunities.

Learning and training is a big part of what we do. We can help you offset your training costs and further develop your employees so that you do need to replace them, just retool them.

We offer safety programs and labor related information for English as a Second Language (ESL) and hazardous materials. Workforce has programs that can help you offset some of your insurance premiums.

We are starting to use a new technology called “spidering” to go out to our local employers and search for job opportunities and incorporate those into our listing. I would estimate that today we have only about 30% of the total job listing, and that is probably a generous number. We are going to see a significant increase in that when we integrate this new approach. We are on the cusp of some really great things.

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Education Initiatives and Background on the Perkins Grant, Nebraska Career Connections - Dean FolkersIt is very difficult to bring all of the educational issues into only a few minutes, but we will do our best.

Seth is going to start with an overview of FutureForce.

FurtureForce is a networked organization of people who want to have conversations about bettering workforce and education around economic development. There are two areas of focus: 1. Help people find what they are interested in so that we can create a career path in that direction. 2. Create awareness of careers available in Nebraska. These are structured around 7 pathways such as entrepreneurship and biomedical/technology. We may develop new pathways as we move forward.

What about renewable energies? Well, we are trying to figure out where that fits. Is it its own pathway or included with another one? Let me give you the answer to that: it needs to be it’s own!

We have already spent some time looking at career connections in the state. In fact we have created a model that helps people identify what they are interested in and those map to six different career areas. Within each area we have 81 clusters that can provide specific direction for each individual to move forward.

Last year we received some grant dollars and have used that to create nebraskacareerconnections.org. We have training schools on how to use this and in January, we are beginning to work with job seekers to utilize this tool. This is a free service and we want to get it to the masses.

We have videos and lots of information that walk people through the steps of the process. There is so much that you can do here. For example, you can drill down to the details of the career pathways. We not only tell you the degrees, but many of the typical class titles that you will need to complete a university to move into that career. Then we connect you with actual local colleges and universities so that you can learn more about their offerings.

We have assessments within our system to help you find direction. We also include tools that others have developed. This toolbox helps you to measure your skills and map them to your interests.

You can also you this tool as a personal online resume. We track all of your assessments and your progress along your career path. We are integrating with secondary education so that we can update your progress and course completions.

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