Alabama’s workforce guru: ‘Maybe the biggest business challenge that we have’
Though barely a week in his new office, former State Sen. Greg Reed’s job has to do with filling other jobs – lots of others.
Gov. Kay Ivey last year appointed the Jasper Republican to serve as her senior advisor on workforce transformation.
Ivey said Reed will be integral in the transition of the Alabama Department of Labor to the Department of Workforce, a change resulting from legislation passed last year.
And as the name implies, Reed is intent on transformation as Alabama continues to chip away at one of its most daunting economic challenges – satisfying the continued need for qualified workers.
“I think it’s maybe the biggest business challenge that we have. And it’s not just Alabama’s challenge,” Reed said. “I think it’s going to be very interesting moving forward with a new presidential administration and a real push on bringing manufacturers back to America from other locations across the world.”
Alabama’s labor force participation rate for November remained unchanged at 57.6%, lower than the national rate at 62.5% and among the lowest in the nation. The rate is the percentage of people in the working-age population who are employed or seeking jobs.
State lawmakers tackled the issue last year with the Working for Alabama legislative package, which included the creation of the Department of Workforce, slated to happen by Oct. 1.
Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth led a task force on workforce development that issued a report in January 2024 with recommendations that included consolidating responsibilities now spread across several state agencies under a new, cabinet-level secretary of workforce development. Ainsworth said at the time that businesses across the state indicated the number one problem is a shortage of workers.
To advise Ivey on the Department of Workforce transition, Reed said he’s consulted with several business leaders around the state. In some ways, he said, the clock is ticking for Alabama. While the state continues to rack up economic development wins with the automotive and aerospace industries, and is seeing increased migration to the state, Alabama’s leaders are also conscious that some business sectors are changing rapidly through technology, such as automakers pushing toward electric vehicles.
Reed said he sees two main issues contributing to the low participation numbers. One is a lack of training for these new business sectors. The other is the need for more emphasis on job training and counseling in the early grades of high school to put students on sustainable career paths.
“If you look at the number of folks in Alabama that have any level of training related to electric vehicles and charging stations, for example,” Reed said, “there’s almost nobody that has that level of training. That is a huge industry that is on its way, depending on how fast it does or does not grow.”
He mentioned the state’s recent billion-dollar transition to broadband, which also impacted rural areas as well as urban. That required job training as well in a changing tech environment. By putting students on an early career path, Reed said, they can enter the job market with skills immediately after graduation without incurring debt from seeking higher education.
Reed also said there are some sectors of the population with a high school education that have not entered the workforce because they lack those skills. Because of this, the options to work seem uninspiring.
But the state is already engaged in several efforts aimed at tackling these problems. The state’s workforce training agency, AIDT, is regularly lauded as one of the best in the country.
Some of the work for this new workforce agency will involve better coordination and communication, across government, education and industry.
“We’re doing a lot of the right things,” Reed said. “We just need some better collaboration and coordination for all of these efforts, making sure that the left hand is knowing what the right hand is doing in many of these efforts. Things are going to be different in different regions of the state. What’s going to be important to the defense industry and important in the aerospace industry, and the like, in North Alabama is going to be very different than what are going to be the requirements in the automotive industry in different places.”