Context Setting

 

Randy Vlasin

Good morning. Welcome to the second day of the Strategy and Design session for Future Force Nebraska.  I appreciate you spending your time helping us with this venture.

We have a mix of individuals including business, education, workforce and economic development. We have people who were here from yesterday and some who are brand new. I want to take a stroll down memory lane to show you where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.

Several years ago some people got together and talked about the workforce in our state and thought that in order to keep a vibrant economy we were needed to take some action to create a workforce that provides for our current and future economy in Nebraska. We brought together components of workforce and economic development, education and businesses. This is where Future Force started.

A year ago this week, we had the first FutureForce Forum. From that work, four initiatives, or pillars of work that emerged. We called these initiatives “pillars” but didn’t realize the implications of that language would make it seem like these things are separate. We have become aware that while some of you may see FutureForce as the specific pillar you are working with, you may not be aware of the other work going on in the other areas, or that other pillars of work even exist. You’ll see this morning that all of these pillars are interconnected though we haven’t operated that way. This is something we’re going to change based on the work that we did yesterday. It became clear that none of these will work unless all of them work in a connected manner. Our main focus is to ultimately support the talent pipeline by developing a highly skilled, well educated workforce.

It wasn’t happenstance that each of you received an invitation to help with this effort. You were targeted because you bring an expertise to this discussion. It is important for each of you to understand how all of the FutureForce initiatives work together. To help develop this understanding we will first take a look at the work that accomplished yesterday. Later, you will build on that work and begin to focus on the steps needed in each initiative to move the combined effort forward.

For those of you new today, we have the privilege of working with InnovationLabs. They helped us last year and we appreciate how they help us further our work and especially how they get us to think differently.

 

   

  

questions (click on a thumbnail below to open the larger version in a new window)

        

 

 

Michael Kaufman

Good morning. I’m going to introduce you to the way we’re going to work here. We have two boards up here to stimulate your thinking. What is Nebraska’s competitive advantage?

  • In the transportation, we are strategically located
  • Affordable housing
  • Availability of water
  • Enjoy the four seasons
  • Affordable education
  • Quality education
  • Strong health care system
  • Cost of living
  • Values
  • Ability to work cooperatively between the private and public sectors
  • Affordable utility costs
  • Great people

MK: I came from California where there are not four seasons and throughout my travels, it is my experience that the quality and character of people rises with having four seasons.

  • Having Warren Buffet here
  • Strong communities
  • A lot of integrity
  • Room to grow
  • A quality road system
  • Nebraska tax advantage program
  • Slow to adopt fads
  • We think things through carefully
  • Strategically located with the rail system
  • A lot of flexibility in making progress because of our form of government (we have a unicameral system of government)
  • We can do a lot quickly when we get everyone on the same page

Getting on the same page is what’s happening here with Future Force.

What can we do to push the envelope around economic development?

  • Keep our talent
  • Welcome immigrants
  • Engage and invigorate our youth
  • Vitalize our rural communities
  • Education needs to become innovative
  • Over decades we’ve created a lot of independence. That is a strength but also our Achilles’ heel. We get a bit territorial within the state.
  • Diversity groups like this. We need to have other races and ages to be here. We can’t speak for them.
  • Reward risk-taking.
  • Look at the financing for education
  • Celebrate entrepreneurial thinking and have friendly thoughts toward people who think innovatively
  • Establish a better broadband connectivity
  • Increase the number of students who go to and complete college
  • We need better skilled workers. Our craft training graduates are considered second class citizens. We don’t have the opportunities at the high school level. Because of the change in the laws, most of the students can’t come working for us until they have at least a year of college. We need the schools to focus on the skills we need. Most of the programs have been dropped out of our schools. The money is not there to do these programs. We didn’t raise hell when we saw that the schools were selling off the equipment and it degraded bit by bit from there.
  • We need to look at the programs that we have. There are some hot subjects that we need to develop. Especially in alternative energy, such as wind power.
  • Speaking with other economic development people in Chicago, I was talking to a lady who lives near Storm Lake, IA and their community college is the only ones who have a wind energy program. They’re graduates will always have jobs and probably start at $75k a year.
  • We also need retooling programs.
  • We need to make sure we tie things together. A lot of the community colleges in Kansas are close to their high schools. We could look at that too.
  • We need to get people interested in a career at a younger age than high school. If we start in college we have too much to do to train them for industry.
  • We need to get our businesses to buy in to the idea of not competition but to be in this together so that we can increase the quality of our talent.
  • When you look at the skilled pool and you see people with 30 years of experience but don’t have a teaching certificate and blocks them from offering their knowledge, we need to consider how to remove those obstacles.
  • When I was in high school, there was a class called diversified occupations, a joint venture between high school and industry. You can get out of school early in order to work as an employee and an apprentice. This needs to happen again.

 

MK: Very good. Thanks for this conversation. The juice is going. What we’re going to do next is to move into tradeshows.

  

Scribing (click on a thumbnail below to open the larger version in a new window)

  

 

 

   

 

 

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