News
Attracting and Retaining Emerging Talent – Greater Lansing's Greatest Economic Challenge
Imagine it! Greater Lansing is a wonderful place to start a career right now and in the
foreseeable future.
Here are some interesting facts about our community:
- The Greater Lansing region’s unemployment rate is approximately 5.5 percent. Most economists believe that 4.0 percent to 5.0 percent unemployment is full employment, so we are very close to full employment.
- Over the next 15 years our region will lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000–10,000 baby boomers from the workforce each year.
- Our region’s educational attainment (percentage of population with bachelor’s degree or higher) is lower than most other similar communities, especially those communities that are experiencing economic growth. (For example, educational attainment is 28 percent in the Greater Lansing region; 39 percent in Madison, Wisconsin; and 42 percent in Austin, Texas). There is a direct correlation between education levels and economic success.
- It is estimated that, at any given time, there are more than 3,000 high-skilled jobs that go unfilled in our community.
Our community’s greatest economic opportunity, and at the same time our greatest economic challenge, is that our workforce is shrinking and the available labor does not have the skills to fill the available jobs. What do we do about that?
Greater Lansing (through such world-class institutions as Michigan State University, Lansing Community College, and Thomas M. Cooley Law School) is a net importer of more than 50,000 of the brightest and most talented young people in the world. We must keep them here by providing economic opportunities and a quality of life that are competitive with other similar communities. Leap, Incorporated, and our partner organizations – Michigan State University, Lansing Community College, Cooley Law School, City of Lansing and Capital Area Michigan Works! – are making sure that these highly talented, highly productive young people find the economic opportunities they seek to ensure we have the workforce of the future
We are launching an experiential learning program called JumpStart. Modeled after similar efforts in Philadelphia and Minneapolis/St. Paul, JumpStart aims to match students from our higher education institutions to internships/part-time opportunities with regional employers. The program fills two important needs:
- Area employers will build a reliable pipeline of talent to fill jobs with employees who gained valuable experience within the firm while they were attending college. In short, much of the on-the-job training will be complete, and recruitment costs will be greatly reduced.
- Students will gain valuable real-life experience to go along with the world-class education they gain from our institutions. And they will be able to transition directly from school to a rewarding career.
JumpStart is not a silver bullet for our workforce issues. However, several area companies, including Jackson National Life, Clark Construction, Auto-Owners Insurance Co., and TechSmith, are already reaping the rewards of this program. JumpStart will go a long way toward solving our workforce issues. You can learn more about JumpStart at our website, www.leapincorporated.com. If your company would like to participate in JumpStart, please contact Leap, Incorporated at 517-702-3387 or info@leapincorporated.com.