Excerpts from the California Rapid Response Roundtable
The California Labor Federation’s Workforce and Economic Development Program (WED), recently hosted its statewide Rapid Response Conference with a focus on business engagement. Team members from the California Workforce Development Board including Director, Tim Rainey and Chief, WIA Policy and Operations Group, Daniel Patterson, were on hand to present a draft directive policy framework for Local Workforce Development Boards (WDB); the policy focused on the design and execution of a local/regional business engagement strategy and the role of layoff aversion within effective Rapid Response systems.
Business U (BU) kicked off the Rapid Response Statewide Roundtable session with an interactive presentation, Maximizing Business Engagement: Cultural & Operational Shifts in a New Era. BU’s presentation was aligned with the draft directive that emphasized a new culture of preventing layoffs and a strong and coordinated infrastructure, including clarity of roles among regional partners across multiple verticals including economic development and education.
BU CEO, Dr. Christine Bosworth, set the framework for the roundtable session. “The art of building a trustworthy and credible transformational relationship requires workforce professionals to decrease their expectations and increase their interactions with business and industry. Not an easy thing to do when funders generally require conditionally motivated performance metrics that have to be met and are basically transactional in nature. A transformational approach is needed to develop a relationship that will engage an employer in a meaningful conversation, one that is specific to issues that could uncover impending layoffs. Because these types of relationships take time to build, we need to start now by partnering with economic and education to expand our reach, anticipate what our business customers need, and measure what matters to them. This is BU’s philosophic approach for business engagement—regionally coalesce the partners, available assets, and resources as a retention and growth strategy to meet the needs of business and industry.”
Patterson commented on the current draft directive, “Rapid Response is one of our many tools and we need to leverage it for business engagement.”
Ken Messina, Massachusetts Rapid Response and Business Services Manager shared his statewide model of a regional coordinated approach in business engagement. The program carries a wide range of incentives and services offered to businesses during all of its cycles. Features of this statewide system include consistency (one team); cost-effectiveness (maximizing resources); and customer choice (gateway to 37 Career Centers).
For more information on BU’s business engagement models, attend our next Community of Practice live webinar on 6/21/16, the featured topic is Engaging Businesses with Work-Based Learning Opportunities. Contact us for an invitation.
This is very informative
Posted by: Hawi Moore | 06/13/2017 at 01:39 AM