There’s a mismatch between job openings and seekers, with about 121,000 open jobs and 106,000 unemployed people in Colorado. The new Education to Employment Alliance thinks they might have the solution.
The group, made up of business and education-oriented organizations such as the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, Colorado Succeeds and Colorado Thrives, released a report last month with five recommendations to better match workers with open positions, including adjusting the skills taught in school to better match the needs of employers. The idea being: Companies tell educators what skills are lacking, educators teach those skills to students and everyone goes home happy.
For many businesses and lawmakers, this isn’t new. Federal and state governments have provided funding for vocational programs through the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act from 2014. The SyncUp Colorado competition in 2021 asked organizations to develop programs for this purpose, with support from the state government, Colorado Succeeds and Colorado Thrives.
“There have been a ton of them, but they’re very siloed,” said Ed Sealover, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Colorado Chamber of Commerce. He believes these programs are already getting more students interested, and coordinating to scale them up will help meet job demand.
Take construction, one of the industries with a consistently high demand for middle-skills workers — which require certification beyond a high school diploma, but not a four-year degree — according to the Colorado Chamber of Commerce’s 2022 and 2023 surveys.
The Colorado River Board of Cooperative Educational Services won $350,000 from the SyncUp competition to fund high school classes where students build 200-square-foot houses. That includes framing, windows and doors, flooring, siding, plumbing, electricity, roofing, installing cabinets and more.
It’s the kind of career-connecting program that the alliance will work to implement more consistently across Colorado, Sealover said. He believes giving students a clear idea of how to pursue those jobs and what their salaries will look like will get them interested.
“I don’t know that there’s one main barrier (to entering middle-skills jobs), but I definitely think social perception is one of them,” Sealover said. “Lack of knowledge as well. We need to remind people that these are good, sustainable careers that the students can get into with far less debt.”
John Fisher agrees. He’s both a general contractor and the teacher for Aspen High School’s tiny homes program, which is a subset of Fisher’s larger woodworking class.
In his 55 years of teaching, he’s seen a decline in the construction, architecture and engineering classes that show students what career paths are available, Fisher said. To cut costs, schools did away with them altogether or moved them to vocational schools.
Aspen High School sophomore Ryley Benson constructs a tiny home during woodworking class on the school campus. The school’s tiny homes woodworking program is the kind of career-connecting class that the Education to Employment Alliance wants to implement more consistently across the state. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
“Once the kids get exposed to it, just like the ones that I have that are working, they’re highly motivated, and they’re very much interested,” Fisher said.
But he may be overestimating that interest. Last year’s project involved just eight students, and of the ones he says are most likely to go into construction, some now say they’ve never considered it — which suggests there are other factors, beyond lack of exposure, that are discouraging them.
Junior Max Sherman said he’s always wanted to go into real estate. He plans to follow in his dad’s footsteps, going into a real estate internship after graduating high school. Eventually, he wants to open a hotel business in a big city, somewhere like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
Sherman likes the stability of that path. “I feel like real estate will always be more or less a safe job,” he said. “There’s a lot of industries popping up right now which could either blow up or they could go away. So I’d rather do a safer choice than gamble it all.”
He’s never really considered other career paths and took woodworking not as a career interest, but because he thought being able to make things like desks and chairs would be a useful life skill. He feels like he got what he wanted out of the class, and he enjoyed it. But he pointed to the physical exertion as a reason he wouldn’t go into construction. “I don’t know if it’s something I want to do five days a week for, you know, 20 years consecutively,” he said.
It seems like great preparation for a construction career, and if he was interested, he could get guidance from Fisher on how to pursue that, Sherman said. He’s just not.
Fisher doesn’t see the physical toll or the pay as drawbacks for the right worker. “They’ll start out at, you know, maybe 25, 30 bucks an hour. Right now, most all laborers are getting 25 bucks an hour,” he said. “They see the potential to make more money by working up to that.”
The Colorado Chamber of Commerce represents business interests, and Sealover said he doesn’t track information on the employee side: what jobs currently unemployed people are looking for, and what’s worked for getting current middle-skills workers into their jobs.
The alliance isn’t concerned with getting a specific number of students into open jobs, and they’re not expecting big changes anytime soon. But classes like Fisher’s will at least show students their options in middle-skills career paths, where the cost of education is much lower, Sealovers said. From there, he expects more and more of them to pursue those jobs.
“You just have to make students aware of the opportunities and figure that some of them are going to choose their own path,” Sealover said.
