How’s Pat Ryan going to do what he said he would?
Ulster County’s top elected official told a predominantly youthful audience at his state-of-the-county speech at Kingston High School in late January that they no longer had to leave the area if they wanted opportunities to succeed. The idea that you need to leave Ulster County to be successful, he declared, was bullshit.
Ryan pledged to create a thousand local well-paying jobs in a thousand days. He said he wanted young people to “at least consider” settling where most of them had grown up.
It was an optimistic, aspirational speech. But will it be in his power to deliver on what he promised?
For a variety of reasons, American job growth in the last decade has been focused in its largest cities. There are almost a million more jobs in New York City than there were ten years ago. The Big Apple has been creating additional jobs at a pace of 1000 every four days during that long period.
The Ulster County program will be led by Lisa Berger, head of the new Economic Development Department and an expert in workforce coordination issues. Berger said the clock would probably start ticking on the thousand days around when the school year ends in mid-May. “We need help developing a talent pipeline,” said Berger in a telephone interview.
Local employers are telling her that they are having trouble getting employees even when they’re offering a starting wage of $15 to $18 an hour. They’d be adding to their workforce in a tight labor market “if they had the talent,” they tell her.
“What we decided to do was to work with the employers,” Berger explained. “Fifteen dollars is where we need to start a solid career pathway.” Further analysis by industry sectors will follow.
But the county effort will focus heavily on the talent-pool component as well. A “talent pipeline,” explains one human-resources manual, consists of “a group of passive candidates you’ve engaged who can fill future roles in your company.” Building the pipeline involves fostering relationships with passive candidates — candidates not actively seeking employment — through social media, events, referrals, sourcing tools and other forms of outreach. Berger puts it simply: finding a job that’s suitable for person’s skill set.
The Ryan administration is betting that a generation of social-media natives will — with a little guidance — respond to social-media messages regarding potential employment opportunities where they haven’t been responding to job offers that haven’t been from their world. The county government’s role would be sort of like that of a social worker: identify the core problem and help the client solve it. This “broader approach,” as Berger puts it, will identify residents’ talents and skills, will help with training, and “will help us create a robust pipeline.”
Despite talk of the anonymity provided by Boolean searches and Artificial Intelligence protections, the possibility that personal information might be used for other than benign purposes must be faced. Further protections must be developed and incorporated for the preservation of personal privacy. These have not yet been articulated.
As an ambitious politician, Pat Ryan realizes that an effective talent pipeline between those entering the job market and existing local industry is but one important component of a larger economic development strategy. It slows the leakage of local young people to other destinations. In a sense, that’s the low-hanging fruit: a good starting point.
The economic niches that are the best fit with Ulster County’s economic strengths and weaknesses have yet to be identified. Nor are the segments of these likely to be attracted.
Finally, there’s the attraction mechanisms themselves, governmental and otherwise. How does Ryan engage the very large population of New York City and ex-New York City people in Ulster County’s midst to participate in his efforts?
No one said that finding a successful and appropriate path to Ulster County’s economic development would be easy. At least Ryan seems to realize that the goal is worth the effort.
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