GRAND FORKS — Those working at the Northwest Private Industry Council have had their hands full since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The NWPIC, a private, nonprofit corporation, was created in 1983 to provide job training under the Job Training Partnership Act. The goal is to provide a partnership between business and government to provide and oversee workforce development programs in northwest Minnesota by connecting students, young adults and those looking for jobs to local employers and businesses. It serves Region One; the northwest region of Minnesota, which includes residents of Kittson, Marshall, Norman, Pennington, Polk, Red Lake and Roseau counties.
The unemployment rate in Minnesota rose to an average of 6.3% in 2020 — the highest rate the state had experienced since 2018. However, in 2021 unemployment was nearly cut in half with a rate of 3.4%, according to Statista.
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Janelle Wald Kovar, executive director of the NWPIC, said there are still challenges facing businesses looking for employees right now — one of which is a “skill mismatch.”
“What type of qualifications do people have?” Wald Kovar said. “And do they match the jobs that are opening? That's an ongoing thing. But the biggest thing right now that we hear is that hiring entities will just say, ‘We need people.’”
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Wald Kovar said matching the right people to the right jobs has become one of the biggest issues facing the Minnesota workforce right now. The goal is to add new jobseekers to the workforce and keep people employed.
Wald Kovar said it can be tough to find those people.
“It's really hard to find people to meet the eligibility requirements sometimes,” Wald Kovar said. “The local area is so pretty sparsely populated geographically. It’s pretty wide (and) pretty big.”
One of the NWPIC’s strategies to combat this is to try to bring people who left the workforce back into it. Wald Kovar calls it “engaging the disengaged.”
“That's kind of a big topic right now,” Wald Kovar. “It’s kind of interesting. How do you do that? What does that look like?”
Vicki Leaderbrand, who is executive director of the Rural Minnesota Concentrated Employment Program and helps Wald Kovar cover Region One, said people retiring early and scaling down to part-time work have removed some candidates from the workforce businesses were previously targeting.
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She contends it has changed the nature of the labor force since the pandemic began.
“Sometimes they, perhaps during COVID, realized, ‘Well, maybe my family doesn't need two salaries to get along,’” Leaderbrand said. “Maybe we can do just fine with one.’ So maybe one partner will drop out of the labor force to stay home and take care of the kids. “
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Leaderbrand said one thing is for certain — this is the best time to be a jobseeker in a long time.
“One of my staff (said), ‘It's an employee's buffet,’” Leaderbrand said. “So employers are challenged with offering more flexible schedules, better benefits, (and) better pay because the demand for the workers is so high, and the supply is simply not there to make a great match for that job. So employers are having to look at different ways to be an employer, frankly. It's no longer ‘Here’s your pay, here's your benefits (and) that’s it.’ It’s, ‘Can I work from home, can I work a flexible schedule,’ and those kinds of things, and so employers have to change their own operations to be able to meet that need.”
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April 17, 2022 at 07:50PM
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'It's an employee's buffet:' Minnesota organization connects businesses with qualified jobseekers - Grand Forks Herald
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