Issue Position: Workforce Development

Issue Position

As we climb out of the recession, our state government has attracted thousands of jobs to Georgia. These jobs have also brought a skills gap. We simply are not graduating enough people from our technical colleges to keep with the recent influx of skilled labor in Georgia.

According to the Department of education, 65-70 percent of our higher education student body, both the university system and the technical college system, should be studying some form of skilled labor vocation in order to keep up with our economic growth. Right now, roughly a third of our student body is doing so.

In 2011, we decreased access to the HOPE Grant, our state's traditional workforce development tool and saw the effects: students left the system.

Since we have seen first hand the correlation between access to technical college and shrinking enrollment, I think it is time that we increase access in order to increase our enrollment in skilled labor training programs.

Georgia's economy is growing, but our trained workforce is not keeping pace. Increasing access to our technical college system while focusing on keeping our graduation and job placement rates high at those institutions is how we keep pace, and get people the jobs they need.

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