Good jobs go wanting
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Wednesday, November 7, 2007
There is a persistent notion that to succeed in life, a young man or woman must earn at least a bachelor's degree at a college or university. It isn't true, but it's a stubborn belief.
Skilled laborers can make a very good living -- even compared to a lot of people who obtain degrees at institutions of higher learning. Welders and machinists, for example, at Weber County's Petersen, Inc. earn middle-class wages -- enough to buy comfortable homes and automobiles and raise families.
Even so, Petersen is having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill its demand for employees. The problem is so acute, in fact, Petersen has decided to open a new shop in Pocatello, Idaho, instead of the Ogden area. As reported by the Standard-Examiner's Jeff DeMoss over the weekend, Petersen will begin moving into a 203,000-square-foot building in Pocatello, and hopes to have 100 workers from that area employed by June 1.
As Rob Despain, vice president of business development for Petersen, told DeMoss, Petersen has not been "able to find enough welders and machinists locally to fit what we're doing, so we decided to look 140 miles north."
This is not a new problem in the Top of Utah, even though Ogden is home to one of the state's finest trade schools: the Ogden-Weber Applied Technology College. (The other is the Davis Applied Technology College in Kaysville.) The OWATC has an impressive history of custom-fit training and partnerships with local businesses, including Petersen, but enrollment has never been sufficient for the companies' needs.
If we go back to February 2005, Ron Kusina, then and now president of the Weber Economic Development Corp., wrote a commentary in the Standard-Examiner which noted: "Our difficulties in meeting work force needs today are not the quality of the programs offered, but the inability to attract the students necessary to meet those needs. Because of this situation, we recently conducted a two-day job fair in Southern California with three of our area companies to attract 100 skilled machinists for employment opportunities in Ogden. These are real jobs, available now, with compensation levels that can support families, and we cannot certify enough of our own residents to qualify for these jobs."
The same holds true today, and we think a big part of the problem is that people don't understand that these jobs are readily available for those with the necessary training.
Whether parents, high school guidance counselors or others aren't providing this information on potential employment, we can't say. But for some reason the word isn't getting out.
That needs to change so the Top of Utah's economy will continue to grow and provide good jobs with higher-than-average pay.
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