The personnel needs required to build and operate the proposed John W. Turk, Jr., Power Plant at Fulton will demand a workforce with at least an associate degree or equivalent technical level education, University of Arkansas Community College at Hope Chancellor Dr. Charles Welch told some 100 Hempstead County businessmen Wednesday.
Welch told the annual investors meeting of the Hempstead County Economic Development Corp. that Southwest Arkansas residents who hope to obtain jobs such as those represented in the construction and operation of the American Electric Power Co./Southwestern Electric Power Co. project will need significant educational retraining.
We're in the construction phase right now, and we need everything from concrete finishing to welding and all of those different kinds of things; not necessarily degree programs, but very highly-trained, non-credit type programs that we're going to do that require 500-plus hours for some of these, Welch said.
He said UACCH was currently working with The Shaw Group, the principal construction contractor for the project, to design a specific needs workforce curriculum that will fit the employment criteria for the some 1,400 construction phase jobs that will be associated with the project.
We're going to take all of those and embed those in our current curriculum so that we can assure that succeeds, he said. In the long, term, my understanding is that the vast majority of those jobs, 80-plus percent, will require an associate's degree in almost exclusively the technical fields that we already offer.
He illustrated his point with the workforce needs which Shaw Group has said it must fill for the SWEPCO project.
This stuff we're working on with AEP/SWEPCO, and Shaw on the power plant, this is a flow chart for how you get folks ready to be their employees, he said. It's complex, it's long-term, and it's risk, in some ways.
Welch said Southwest Arkansans must be willing to take the risk to learn more in order to adapt to those kinds of demands.
We're engaged in conversations with Shaw and SWEPCO, and Texarkana College is going to be our partner in this, we can't do it by ourselves, we're going to have to do it together, to try and pre-employ 400 people to work in the preliminary construction phase, he said. We're not even talking about permanent positions yet; we're talking about construction phase.
Those employees will require up to 500 clock hours of training, he said.
Hey, you just don't go out to the college for a couple of days, and you're trained, Welch quipped. This is really intense stuff.
He appealed to the community at large in Hempstead County to understand the demands upon the workforce that technology has created.
We're going to engage in focus groups; we're going to have to have your feedback, and with your help, I hope when we call you, you will do that, Welch said.
Those points underscored Welch's primary theme, that the United States is falling behind the world in higher education, Arkansas is already behind the nation in higher education, and Southwest Arkansas is behind Arkansas in higher education.
Welch said the six most promising job markets nationally are agricultural/biotechnology, chemical technology, engineering technology, environmental technology, information technology, and nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology, or the use of sub-microscopic technology to perform precision tasks, is being developed as a course of study now, Welch said.
We're engaged right now in a multi-million dollar grant application in nanotechnology from the National Science Foundation, and I have to commend our industry department head, when he was asked if we're doing nanotechnology yet, he said, Maybe, not yet; but we will be. We have to get out in front of this,' Welch said. That is not the area of my grandfather's job market. It has changed; it's rapidly changing.
He said Southwest Arkansans must realize that business and industry is beginning now to train its workforce for jobs that have not yet been created.
We can't be reactive anymore, he said. We can't say to industry, Come here and we will get you the workforce.' We have to say, We have got the workforce, come here.'
He pointed to a coalition of community colleges in Southeastern Arkansas which is currently developing such an approach.
They have got $28.5 million in federal grant funds to train a workforce, he said. They're training students for jobs that aren't even there, yet; they are training them in ways that make them employable in other fields, but they are training them for the jobs that may be there.
That is what we have to do in Southwest Arkansas, Welch added. It's complex and it's long term.
He said that while UACCH has grown, with head count enrollment for the fall up 19 percent and full-time student enrollment up 26 percent, scholarship funding for those students has grown 470 percent.
At the same time, Arkansas remains near the bottom nationally in the number of residents with college degrees at 16.7 percent, and Southwest Arkansas is behind that at 10.9 percent, Welch said.
We're not doing a good enough job educating our people to compete in global markets, he said.
Welch said the majority of technical field jobs in the U.S. are now being filled by foreign nationals, who in many cases are educated in the United States.
He spoke of a student from India who could not gain admission to a prestigious technical college in his own country, so his second choice was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Welch said it is no longer enough to simply go to college, either. He said the workforce itself is growing smaller with some 80 million people of the Baby Boomer generation preparing to retire while only 46 million people were available to replace them in the workforce.
The key, Welch said, is a concerted effort to invest in human capital.
We're starting a secondary careers center where we focus on careers in technical programs at our institution for high school students, Kenneth Muldrew is interested in this, as are our other superintendents, to get them focused on the possibility of a career in a technical field where they might have better job opportunities, he said. We have got to sell those technical fields; sometimes, it's like selling air conditioning in the middle of winter in Alaska, but we've got to sell those technical fields because that is the future of our economic development.
We've got to go out on a limb, folks, Welch said. We have to be willing to take the risks. We have to anticipate needs.
