Mountain summit participants discuss new training pathways, affordability opportunities

While Colorado’s mountain towns may not have trouble attracting visitors from across the world, they have a heap of issues in finding workers to keep their businesses going, and even in retaining the homegrown workforce that knows the area best.

So, when 75 leaders from the construction, healthcare and tourism industries gathered in Edwards Tuesday for the Opportunity Now Regional Talent Summit, they came with shared goals: Reduce the shortage of skilled professionals and the cost of living for those workers. And while work groups from the different sectors suggested different strategies for boosting career pathways, they agreed they must work together too to tackle bigger-picture affordability concerns.

In some senses, then, the sixth of seven planned regional talent summits — an initiative suggested by the business-focused Education to Employment Alliance and brought to life by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade — rang familiar. The frameworks for the two- and five-year goals crafted by each industry involved closer collaboration with local colleges on creation of specific credentials and greater efforts to promote career opportunities through K-12 school systems.

But in this uniquely high-cost area of Colorado, stretching from Aspen to Winter Park and from Vail to Park County, the assembled leaders agreed that increased educational opportunities mean nothing if they can’t keep entry-level workers living in the region. And so, they vowed to work also through public-private partnerships to create housing specific to their industries and to work together on shared training programs to reduce costs to employers while boosting pay for employees.

“Community vitality” in mountain towns

Chris Romer — president/CEO of the Vail Valley Partnership, the regional host for this summit — noted that the challenges of operating in mountain resort towns make industry leaders “inherently collaborative.” And he said that seemed to fuel the proposals they brought to and developed further at the all-day summit.

“When we’re talking about workforce, we’re talking about community vitality. Communities, at their foundation, is about focusing on strong people,” Romer told the crowd at Colorado Mountain College. “If we don’t have strong people, it’s impossible to have strong businesses. If we don’t have strong businesses, we don’t have strong communities. It’s all interconnected, and it all ebbs and flows together.”

The industry-led ideas generated at the summits will be honed by smaller regional action teams of attendees and then unveiled as two- and five-year goals in December in the annual Colorado Talent Pipeline report. Those same teams of public and private partners then will work to enact the goals through 2030 with the aim of creating greater pipelines into high-priority industries and preparing learners with the specific skills they need to enter good-paying careers.

Each of the industries brought the perspective that they have a hard time recruiting workers from outside the area because of the high cost of mountain living — and a difficulty retaining area graduates for the same reason. Each discussed focusing on students who don’t want four-year degrees by offering more efficient and lower-cost paths into entry-level positions and then clearly laying out career-progression pathways for those workers.

Health care: More workers for entry-level positions

In health care, for example, participants said they want to work immediately with Colorado Mountain College to set up a digital-imaging credentialing programs for radiology technicians, a profession that is particularly short-staffed in the area. From there, they advocated for creating and publicizing upskilling programs with educational institutions to help advance entry-level medical assistants and for launching healthcare boot camps to get interested students into other easily accessible jobs.

Key to the success of these programs, for which industry leaders will help develop curricula and offer work-based-learning opportunities to students who take the courses, is having a central point of contact to work with them and with schools, attendees said. An identified  organization to serve as an intermediary can also get industry leaders into K-12 schools to promote the wide range of careers available to students interested in the field and can help develop new pathways in emerging fields like behavioral health care.

“I feel like we’ve got all the players but no point guard,” said Tom McCauley, chief human resources officer at Aspen Valley Health, about the willingness of industry to do more while acknowledging some coordination is needed. “We need a tight collaboration between Colorado Mountain College, high schools and the employers.”

Tourism: Credentialing in customer-service culture

Tourism leaders said that while they would like to see more specific training available in areas like cooking and hotel maintenance, what they really need is workers with durable skills like emotional intelligence and teamwork who can handle a variety of roles. Understanding the seasonal nature of the work, one sector proposal was to set up a worker exchange program — first between the mountains and other areas of the state and then between Colorado tourism employers and those in other states.

Magda King, general manager of the Antlers at Vail, said the sector also has a chance to set itself apart nationally and boost its workers’ resumes by creating a badging or credential system for workers who have been through training to prove these skills. Such work could be done in conjunction with a local college or could be integrated as a trade route in the school system and help workers to enter and advance in the field.

“I think that a customer-service component in every job is so important,” King said. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a Colorado service culture?”

Construction: More work-based learning in mountain areas

Students already are beginning to gravitate more to construction trades, but it’s often harder to train for those skills in the mountain communities than on the Front Range, where workers tend to stay for the lower cost of living and wider range of jobs, leaders said. Federal and state rules also restrict the activities that student learners can do on job sites and the time they can spend there unless they are part of licensed pre-apprenticeship programs, which are fewer in the mountains, employers said.

Kathryn Regjo, CMC vice president of academic affairs, said her college could work with employers and high schools to set up more dual-enrollment programs, which would let students work in summers when work-based learning through high schools generally is not available. Rich Clubine, owner of Active Energies Solar, said industry leaders can form a regional sector partnership to ensure they are able to get representatives into classrooms to lay out career pathways and let students see the opportunities they have.

“I think it’s incumbent upon industry professionals to educate and create some kind of insight — and provide some guidance from an educational curriculum perspective,” Clubine said.

Industry leaders did not come up with a definitive plan for creating more workforce housing at the gathering, but they offered ideas to get that longer-term discussion going. McCauley said leaders of certain industries could help fund more employee housing in their region, and construction leaders suggested their companies could partner with such coalitions to build the housing and provide accommodations for their workers.

The final regional talent summit is planned for June 13 at Pikes Peak State College in Colorado Springs. The focus industries for that event will be aerospace and defense, advanced manufacturing and technology.