Last week, members of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Committee met in North Carolina to discuss how we as a country are going to strengthen our workforce. It was all about finding opportunity and best practices that our business owners need. One thing they agreed on? Establishing a common metric to track what our companies are doing. Our Department of Economic Development Workforce Development Manager Jake Maxwell offers this latest blog with metrics and examples of Salt Lake City companies leading the way. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

There is no question that an employee who feels seen and appreciated for their talents is more likely to stay. In a recent article produced by SHRM, the nations leading Human Resources organization, they began discussion around common measurements for employee training. This is exciting to me because every business I find investing in their employees often does not have a retention problem. Here are a few of their findings after surveying 1033 of their Human Resource members speaking on behalf of their respective businesses:

  • 67 percent of employers provide educational assistance to some or all of their employees, and 36 percent of employees at these organizations take advantage of it.
  • 42 percent of employers work with educational partners to upskill their employees, while only 29 percent of employers work with local or federal government agencies to obtain skills-based training grants.
  • 55 percent of employers do not offer any type of apprenticeship program.
  • 55 percent of HR professionals had a training budget last year.

The numbers are encouraging, however there is still a big gap. If you are a business, suppose that half of your competition is providing skills training to add value to their employee experience, which is why we would love to drop by to show you where you can take advantage of partnerships that not only help businesses build in training opportunities, but offset costs as well.

Salt Lake City YESCO Employee Training

I’ll take this opportunity to highlight a couple of businesses I have recently met with who are really leading the way on this. The first is YESCO, a local sign company with a long Utah heritage who offers a strong apprenticeship opportunity to Welders and Painters to help design their artistic signs. No day is the same and they can always use more trainees. This is “earn and learn”, and they are paying more than the prevailing wage while students learn this high wage, high demand skill.

stadlerrailtraining

The second is Stadler Rail, one of our proud recruits to Salt Lake City. Stadler wasted no time partnering with the K-12 system and Salt Lake Community College to build out their “swiss model” apprenticeship program that will increase opportunity in west Salt Lake City. We look forward to see how their first cohort goes!

To get in touch with us about developing your incumbent workforce, or to share your own successes for programming at your business, please reach out! We would love to drop by.