Today we are treated to another "feel good about us" editorial in the Observer-Dispatch, Guest View: Help grow future of manufacturing in Mohawk Valley, which touts the (taxpayer funded) efforts of our "Workforce Development Board" to provide "training" for area employers.
Once upon a time this region was flush with literally thousands of "high-tech" jobs, many requiring engineering degrees, yet, at the same time, there was no SUNY-Poly or other 4-year state institution, Utica College was merely a small branch of Syracuse University, and Mohawk Valley Community College had neither dorms nor a campus in Rome.
If today's editorial had been published then it would have been met with questions of "Why is it the taxpayer's responsibility to provide training for employers?"
The only jobs supported are those of the trainers who use use the lack of manufacturing jobs to justify taxpayer support of their own.
Simply put, "workforce training" has not and will not bring back manufacturing jobs.
We are overtaxed, overregulated, and our utility and transportation costs are overpriced to be attractive to manufacturers.
3 comments:
Don't leave the community colleges and other training centers out of any scrutiny. Often training for jobs that don't exist are developed by these schools to help their enrollments bottom line, allow more hiring of administrative deans. etc., construct new buildings to add to the empire, and then turn the education job over to "adjunct" professors, i.e., grad school students and high school teachers who will work cheap. Some schools are still teaching general computer applications. Computers in education should be tools, not subject matter.
There are something like 146 different government so called job training programs that are on the books right now. Here, how many years as how many taxpayer dollars has the Dave Mathis job training effort been on going? Why, we should both as a nation and area have the best, most well trained workforce in the history of man kind. Why have we lost 2 million manufacturing jobs just in the past few years? Then, turn around and look at private companies, many of them here; Met, BNY Mellon, The Hartford just to name a few. They all have top notch training programs and all have grown and prospered here.
I worked in both public education and corporate education. The difference is remarkable. Corporate education is pertinent, presented well and constantly tested to ensure the educational objectives are being met, are still useful to the overall curriculum and can relate well to the business objectives of the company. Corporate teaching jobs are highly competitive. They test and reward competence as well as the ability of the instructor to manage the class for maximum learning by the students. Anything about corporate education judged less than excellent is quickly eliminated as a bad invesment.
Post a Comment