LINCOLN — Many Nebraska workers lack the skills needed to earn higher wages, and more should be done to encourage them to get additional education and training, speakers at a conference said Thursday.
“We can predict a skills gap,” said Kate Bolz of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest, a sponsor of the second annual event. About 50 representatives of education, human services and employment agencies attended.
Other sponsors were the Center for People in Need, Opportunity at Work, the AIM Institute and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Bolz said one in four working families in Nebraska subsists on a low-wage job.
There are various definitions for what constitutes a low-wage job, but Bolz said she defined it as a household earning less than $44,000 annually for a family of four.
In many low-wage households, the parents have only a high school education, she said. Yet by 2018 about 66 percent of all jobs in the state will require some postsecondary training.
In the future, many jobs will come in industries such as biosciences, financial and health services, food production and agricultural machinery manufacturing, Bolz said.
Margaret Simms, director of the low-income working families project at the Urban Institute in Washington, said Nebraska has weathered the recession better than many parts of the country. The state's unemployment rate in August was 4.6 percent, compared with the national rate of 9.6 percent, she said.
However, pockets of the state have unemployment rates closer to the national level, she said.
“The recession is over, but that has little to do with circumstances under which people are living,” Simms said. “We'll have a really slow climb out of the recession in terms of job generation.”
Jobs and job training are available if people know where to look, some conference participants said.
September Stone, administrator of the Nebraska Health Care Learning Center in Lincoln, said nursing assistants are needed at hospitals, assisted living centers and nursing homes.
Often a first step to obtaining more advanced nursing degrees, the center's nursing assistant program offers two weeks of training followed by a state exam, Stone said.
Nursing assistants earn about $23,000 a year helping with tasks like meal preparation and patient care such as bathing and dressing, Stone said.
“We've seen an increasing number of people displaced, downsized, who are looking at health care,” Stone said. “This is a look at quick training, see if it's a good fit for you.”
Rich Torraco, a professor of work force development at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said the Center for People in Need, Southeast Community College, UNL and other groups are sponsoring a workshop to train building contractors. The course combines hands-on training with classroom education.
Bolz said integrating services, in education and child care, for example, is necessary, as are private-public efforts to help people learn new skills.
Jan Norlander-Jensen of the City of Lincoln's Urban Development Department said she came to the conference because she, too, believes agencies that help people find jobs must work together.
Agencies that aren't networking aren't doing the job for people who need training, she said.
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