The entire 2014 California Economic Summit – Capitol Day is now available for viewing on YouTube. The video above is part two: “Training Workers for the Next Economy & Speaker Atkins.”
Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) gave some kudos to the Summit process and the scope of the challenges it is undertaking in her speech to the hundreds of Californians attending.
“Your goal—economic prosperity, environmental quality, and expanding opportunity for everyone—is right on target,” Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins told Summit leaders Tuesday. “I believe one of our most important jobs in the Capitol is finding the right balance, a balance where California has a strong business climate that generates jobs and revenue, where we’re also safe, healthy, and financially able to live, work, and raise our families. That’s really it. The solutions aren’t so easy.”
Following the Speaker, the conversation swung to California manufacturing and how to create the workforce that California’s next economy needs. The benefits of maintaining and growing California’s manufacturing sector, the biggest in the country, are well understood and why the Summit chose to make it a priority.
“Manufacturing is critical to our economy because you can look at the many, many studies that say, for every manufacturing job you create, it will create anywhere from seven to 13 additional direct and indirect jobs,” said moderator Mark Roberts, CEO of the small manufacturer, Springboard Diesel. “So that’s a big bang for the buck in terms of creating an environment where companies want to relocate or stay or grow in California.”
A key component to keeping manufacturing in California is working with education and industry to curate a pipeline of properly trained workers for manufacturers and other sectors of the economy here.
“So we need to break some of those silos to make sure K-12 works hand-in-hand with community colleges, higher ed and probably get away from the notion that students are either going to go to college or go to work in blue collar jobs because we now know with the demand in industry, in manufacturing that we need a highly trained workforce that’s going to need more training than just beyond high school,” said Assemblymember and panelist Jose Medina.
The conversation in this installment of the Capitol Day video series from CalChannel includes the following speakers:
Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins
Workforce and Manufacturing Conversation
Moderatored by Mark J. Roberts, CEO of Springboard Biodiesel, LLC
Assemblymember Jose Medina
Kish Rajan, director of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz)
Jose Anaya, statewide sector navigator of California Community Colleges Doing What Matters for Jobs and the Economy
Kris Costa, articulation liaison of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges,
You can watch all of the other sections of the Capitol Day program on this YouTube playist. Thanks goes to CalChannel for recording and editing their video of Capitol Day.
