On The Job - Workforce Development Czar Needed In Oklahoma

You know what they say about the weather: Everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. A similar statement could be made about Workforce Development in Oklahoma: “Everybody talks about how important it is, but nobody coordinates it.”

Don’t get me wrong. There are a good number of people and organizations working hard to move the needle on workplace development in our state, including:

• Oklahoma Office of Workforce Development;

• The Governors Council on Workforce Development;

• Oklahoma Department of Commerce;

• Career Tech;

• Nonprofit organizations like Goodwill Industries, Urban League, New View and Dale Rogers Training Center.

But the lack of coordinated effort is holding us back.

Chad Warmington, executive director of the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce, was recently quoted, lamenting the lack of coordination in workforce development:

“Nobody is really tasked with owning that … We don’t have a workforce czar, we don’t have somebody who is pulling them all together and trying to get them on the same page. Whose job is it going to be to highlight that and then to say to the Legislature we are going to fund these programs and we need to make sure we are getting these people together?”

My friend and fellow advocate of workforce development, Don Morris, executive director of Oklahoma Works, says:

“There are a lot of great people doing a lot of work to train Oklahoma’s current and workforce – it just needs a better seat at the table. Implementing a Czar will have a powerful effect on the level of attention paid to workforce. I think workforce needs more to be elevated than coordinated. With deeper investments and centralized leadership, with the support of the governor and Oklahoma Legislature, we can build and accomplish programs similar to what New York and other states have done.”

Perhaps we could borrow a page from the state of New York’s play book. In a press release earlier this year the plan was laid out:

“On April 26, 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a new investment of $350 million for workforce development to create the New York State Office of Strategic Workforce Development (OSWD), better aligning workforce development efforts with the needs and priorities of today’s employers … (This) will help create new economic opportunities for unemployed, underemployed and underrepresented workers, while simultaneously meeting the labor needs of the state’s highest-growth industry sectors.”

What would it take to cultivate such coordination?

• Funding. Federal funding needs to be supplemented with state dollars.

• An organization, tasked with coordinating Workforce Development throughout the state with authority to utilize both carrots and sticks to ensure collaboration, coordination and elimination of territorialism.

• A charismatic and intelligent leader. Someone undertaking the Herculean task of fostering a common vision and joint efforts toward a lofty goal that challenges the very best from all of us. Someone who could embody the spirit of President Kennedy’s 1962 goal setting speech:

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

We could do it. We should do it. May our efforts in workforce development be as successful as the Apollo mission.

Jim Priest is president and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Central Oklahoma.