April 18, 2000

Comptroller's Office Hears Workforce Concerns in San Antonio

Business, labor and government must work together to provide a better educated workforce for the future in Texas, according to testimony heard at an e-Texas workforce public hearing in San Antonio.

The hearing was part of Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander's e-Texas initiative, a citizen commission charged with developing recommendations to help Texas state government meet the challenges of the Internet Age.

Major Issues

Major issues discussed by panelists and audience members included:

• Training and re-training today's workforce
• Recruiting online, and
• Creating good jobs for all Texans.

Panelists Commentary

"When the Federal government closed Kelly Air Force Base (AFB), we were given $14 million for workforce re-development, job placement and business creation," said Paul Roberson, executive director of the Greater Kelly Development Authority. "Our plan is to create 21,000 good paying jobs by the year 2006 by recruiting business and industry to occupy the Kelly facilities."

To this date, the Greater Kelly Development Authority (GKDA) has drawn large companies such as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Ryder to Kelly AFB. These companies have created 4,411 jobs on the former Air Force base.

The GKDA has plans, other than just business recruiting, to transform some of the 4,000 acres abandoned when Kelly AFB was closed in 1995. Part of the plan includes:

• A possible magnet high school aimed at science and technology,
• A skills application center to provide technical training, and
• A graduate education center and a K-12 outreach center to help students learn about technical careers.

The centers would involve partnerships between colleges, universities and the business sector to provide continued training for technical and other jobs. The K-12 outreach center would allow businesses to inform students of the educational needs for jobs with their companies.

"The Air Force is roughly two-thirds of the way moved off the base," Roberson said. "We have a unique opportunity to have a plan in place and most of the facilities at the base renovated, occupied and ready to be occupied by the time the Air Force has completely moved off Kelly AFB."

Roberson added, 61 percent of the federal workforce on Kelly AFB was Hispanic. He said the GKDA plan includes keeping middle-income jobs available and filled by the Hispanic community.

GKDA is recruiting to fill a facility with companies and create jobs, jobs.com is in the practice of online recruiting of employees to fill available jobs.

Troy Bullock, project development manager for jobs.com in Dallas, said online recruiting is becoming more popular for business and government because access is immediate and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"Our online ads can reach 4 million people a month," Bullock said. "People can go to our job site any time of the day, any day of the week. And businesses can post jobs within an hour—instead of writing an ad for the paper, and placing the order, and waiting the next day for the ad to run."

Bullock said other benefits include: lowered costs to the business for posting jobs, increased level of response, and added exposure to job seekers. Additionally, employers are able to store documentation and provide applications online.

"In the year 2000, 98 percent of the Fortune 500 companies will have online recruiting," Bullock said. "Internet recruiting has surpassed magazines on the list of preferred posting methods, and only falls behind newspapers."

Rick Levy, AFL-CIO legal director from Austin, said companies and government should not forget about the less fortunate people that do not have computers and do not know how to use computers.

"Employers used to provide internal training, now they look at outside sources to provide training or expect employees to already be trained," Levy said. "We need to focus on making good job opportunities available to everyone, not just the fortunate."

Levy said government should use public funds to train the workforce for good jobs and work to connect the unemployed and under-employed to good jobs that will lead to even better jobs, not just move people into the workforce at any type of employment.