Emily Stover DeRocco Speech
Rapid Response Conference
May 23, 2006
St. Louis, MO
Thank you all for coming today. It is a pleasure to join so many professionals who have been working at the front lines of our economic transformation.
For more than a generation, you have been the economy's first responders, working to provide benefits to laid-off workers and connecting them to new jobs. This work has provided comfort and hope for millions of Americans during difficult times. But as times change and the economy evolves, we too must change to keep our commitment to the workers and families that we serve.
The last five years have seen a fundamental transformation of the U.S. economy. Technology has permeated every industry, increasing productivity and raising the required skill levels for millions of jobs. At the same time, globalization has opened our economy to nearly every country in the world, bringing with it both greater opportunity and greater competition.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our manufacturing sector. Supply chains now stretch around the world as advances in transportation and logistics provide just-in-time delivery. At the same time, American manufacturing jobs now require advanced understanding of computers and robotics.
Just this spring, I visited an aerospace manufacturer in California. Not one of the 50 employees on the factory floor that day had less than a bachelor's degree. Similar examples can be found across all sectors of the manufacturing industry as the transition is made to advanced manufacturing.
While this has made manufacturing now home to truly high skill jobs, it has come at the expense of millions of low-skill jobs, filled often by workers with a high school degree or less who depended on the industry for stable jobs and strong wages.
I cite manufacturing not only because it is a strong example of the economic transformation occurring today, but also because they have historically been one of the biggest customers for rapid response services. With the transformation of the industry though, the layoffs traditionally experienced in manufacturing are not cyclical but structural. Those jobs and those workers will not be coming back.
In such an environment, simply enrolling those workers in unemployment insurance and registering them for the job service is not sufficient. Instead, we must become the gateway to the full range of services offered by the workforce investment system-and I mean the full portfolio of all our partners.
Rapid response has the unique role of being the first contact of our system with affected workers. You, in essence, are our ambassadors, representing all the functions of the workforce system. In that role, it is critical that you understand the dynamics of the region's economy and the range of services and opportunities available to your customers.
This expanded role for rapid response cannot happen in vacuum. It must be accompanied by transformed services across the system as a whole. It is this transformation that we have been working towards over the last several years.
It started with the basic commitment to become demand-driven. We know our system is not an independent operator in the community, performing services off in some distant corner. Instead, it can and should be an integral part of a regional economy. But to reach that goal, we must be better connected with the region's employers--understanding their workforce needs and developing mutual trust by building a professional relationship. At the federal level we have demonstrated this with the High Growth Job Training Initiative-a strategic effort to put employers in charge of directing investments to skills and competencies required on jobs.
Our efforts then expanded to the education sector. While our system may understand employer demands, we are dependent upon others to provide the education and training for workers to meet those demands. Ninety percent of the fastest growing jobs in our economy require a post-secondary education. Two thirds of all high growth, high wage jobs require a bachelor’s degree. Only thirty percent of people have a college degree. By making education institutions full partners, in particular the nation's community colleges, our training services can be more responsive to employers and provide relevant training for our job-seeking customers.
