It’s time to take your HR manager to lunch. He or she will soon be a very close ally in your efforts to supply workforce intelligence to the group deciding where your next personnel-heavy facility will go. Availability of skilled or at least trainable workers tops most lists of site criteria, and your HR department is probably already wading through the various resources areas and organizations are making available to quantify skillsets at your disposal.
I recommend you add “credentialing” to your professional lexicon, because you will be learning a lot about it in the coming months — just as I am. In short, competency-based credentials increasingly are being used to complement academic degrees and diplomas as tools with which to assess skills availability. Excellent work is well under way in the manufacturing, energy, IT and others sectors — meaning credentialing frameworks are in place to help employers get a better sense of just who the workers really are when an area touts its workforce.
But the landscape is changing quickly. The frameworks are evolving. Some of them overlap. Stakeholders include professional associations, higher education institutions, foundations, labor organizations, think tanks and others. Private-sector employers will benefit handsomely from the work these groups are engaged in, as will your future workforce. So it’s time to learn what they’re up to.
Start with connectingcredentials.org, the website managed by the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) and the Center for Law and Social Policy, with support from the Lumina Foundation. More than 90 co-sponsoring organizations are involved in Connecting Credentials, an initiative to foster a national dialogue on credentialing.
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by Mark Arend, January 2016, Site Selection Magazine
