The Nevada workforce is in a massive transition. Workforce development professionals in the state are working diligently to help usher in a new era of employees in Nevada, which will help continue the state’s economic diversification and self-reliance.
“It’s a two-part story,” said Lisa Levine, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation (GOWINN). “The Nevada workforce was hit hard in the pandemic, especially because of our reliance on travel and leisure. And the state hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession, so it’s not even just hit hard, but essentially triple hard.”
Nevada has recovered well from the pandemic, with more jobs than pre-pandemic levels now sitting at a record 1,452,600 jobs, 3,000 more than the February 2020. Many of those jobs have come from emerging Nevada industries, said Brian Gordon, principal at Applied Analysis.
“The mix of jobs differs greatly from where it stood prior to the pandemic,” Gordon said. “Not all the leisure and hospitality positions have returned, and significant investments were made in warehouse and distribution positions, and manufacturing, especially in northern Nevada.
“The economy has experienced increased diversification, particularly because the negative effects and implications of tourism, but also the investments being made in emerging industries.”
While the jobs are climbing to all-time highs, the state has a historically low labor force percentage, sitting at 61 percent. There are almost two job openings for every job seeker, Gordon said, though as major corporations begin to ponder recession-fueled “right sizing,” he believes that could start to readjust soon.
Levine said GOWINN talks regularly with employers large and small about their struggles in attracting and retaining talent. As an example, just in the state government, there are 21 percent of its jobs open, or approximately 4,500 positions.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s the largest company on the Strip or the smallest one in a rural community, everyone is feeling the workforce shortage,” Levine said. “It’s really how do we [solve] it holistically so it’s not a bandaid fix.”
Perhaps the most eye-opening projection to exemplify the need for talent in Nevada is a statistic from the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research. The report suggests the number of healthcare workers in Clark County will increase by 85,000 over the next 18 years, and to reach that, the state needs to triple educational services to meet the national per capita average. That means the state needs to increase those positions by 171,190. Levine said those numbers can be extrapolated beyond Clark County and in other professions as well.
All of these circumstances mean it is increasingly important for Nevada stakeholders to do what they can to attract, upskill, reskill and facilitate the state’s population to help usher in the new state economy.
“You have a great number of folks transitioning from one industry to another. While great strides are being shown, it does take time, not only for education, but for the businesses to adapt to the evolving education,” Gordon said. “COVID opened many people’s eyes to the shift in the economy and other new employment opportunities that they might not have seen in the absence of the health crisis.”
Changing Economy
During the pandemic, Clark County was especially hit hard because of the reliance on travel and tourism. However, northern Nevada was able to weather the low points of the health crisis, said Elissa Cafferata, director of the Nevada Department of Employment Training and Rehabilitation (DETR).
“The unemployment rate around Nevada varied greatly by different counties,” she said. “Northern and rural Nevada had much lower unemployment than Clark County and part of that is the diversifying economy. They’ve had growth in manufacturing and transportation and those types of jobs that don’t require a ton of interpersonal interaction.”
Nevada’s new priority sectors include healthcare, advanced manufacturing, logistics and information technology.
Those jobs also provide a new type of career ladder that can begin with basic credentials but a steady upstream path to acquire new skills to progress in a career, Cafferata said.
“One of my priorities is [to] help people get into those trainings and opportunities, because, while they’re not hidden, sometimes they’re not easy to find,” she said.
Cafferata said a lot of people who lost their hospitality jobs during the pandemic are coming to terms that some of those jobs might never return.
“A lot of the casinos have changed the way they operate, they’ve automated certain things, those jobs might never come back,” Cafferata said. “One of the biggest challenges is folks who have worked in those industries for a long time, decades in some cases, in past economic downturns, those jobs might have come back as tourism came back. That’s not the case any longer, so we need to help them retool their skills and careers.”
For decades, the U.S. culture has pushed college as the solution to all economic problems and the idea every student should attend a traditional two- or four-year university. The new economic model will require a culture change and it will start with K-12 education.
With the need for many trades professionals, Levine said there has been a shift to presenting those jobs as a patriotic duty, with the attitude that, “You are a superhero if you’re doing this.”
“It’s about learning skills for everyone to succeed,” Levine said. “Higher education has been redefined, it’s no longer about the traditional two- or four-year degree. How do we do short-term training programs that are stackable and have real impact so they can go and know there is a good job when they’re done and incentivizing it a step further for on-the-job training to earn as they learn?”
Those changes will require more educators, and that in itself is an attraction and retention struggle, Levine said. She said a potential nursing instructor might not even make half of what a traveling nurse is making now, upwards of a $250,000 salary.
She said it’s changing the culture of what it means to be a contributing professional in the U.S.
“The training programs we’re helping support and build gives folks more passion and purpose,” Levine said. “The culture piece really matters and if we can show that, more people might be intrigued.”
Working to Fill Positions
With more jobs than jobseekers, a major key to helping the economy move forward is attracting some people back into the workforce, said Milt Stewart, CEO of Nevada Works.
“There is a pool of folks out there that are not in the workforce for different reasons, maybe just lingering COVID effects, childcare issues, but some of it is barriers of employment to get them back in,” Stewart said. “We’re trying to be mindful of that, most folks who want a job have a job. It’s those folks who need help or upskilling or training and those are the folks we’re targeting just to increase the overall pool.”
Stewart said even a new worker into an entry level position will help get them into a pipeline, which opens up the opportunity for an employer to promote from within and fulfill their talent needs.
The agencies are working together on a pilot program for incumbent workers. Normally, most money from the government is reserved to help train potential employees, not those already in a position.
There is a now a $1 million pilot program companies use to train employees, leading to a promotion or wage increase, and then the state’s agencies can help backfill the vacated position.
Multiple Nevada workforce development organizations are collaborating using Project SANDI, a to help pay for training for workers that were disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Project SANDI helped Nevada secure $13.8 million from the U.S. Department of Educations’ Education Stabilization Fund-Reimagination Workforce Preparation Discretionary Grants Program. It was one of eight states to receive funds from the program to create or expand short-term education and training opportunities.
Nevada’s partners set a goal to help 1,700 with the federal funds by fall 2023. “Nevada is notorious for leaving federal dollars on the table,” Levine said. “We’re working to bring in more and we’re working to change that.”
The funds are largely funneling through community colleges in Nevada. Levine said they work with employers to ensure the curriculum is helpful and the non-traditional students get through with a job at the end. For example, Western Nevada College has developed as a strong pipeline for Tesla in Reno.
WNC has trained 62 Tesla employees in its manufacturing technician program. “We understand that providing continued education and supportive resources for our employees directly influences morale of our team and the future of Tesla,” Tesla Production Engineering Supervisor Nicholas Schafer said. “We want to see our team members succeed and strive to level-up in their positions and we have seen positive results of this occur directly from the courses offered at WNC.”
Project SANDI graduates have strong job placement in fields like Certified Nursing Assistant, Dialysis Patient Care Technician, Certified Nursing Assistant, Data Analyst, Python Developer, Industrial Millwright, Mechatronics, Diesel Technician, HVAC Technician, Emergency Medical Technician, Front End Software Developer and welder.
After the SANDI programs, students also receive a “navigator” who works with the training partners and keeps tabs on the graduates to see how the program worked.
The workforce development stakeholders are also helping increase instructional touchpoints, Stewart said, especially in rural communities to help potential job seekers register and/or receive training services.
In many cases, a lot of the training is also on soft skills, Stewart said. He said a program called Skill Up has more than 5,000 classes, ranging from soft to hard skills. Often, soft skill classes, like “phone etiquette” and “how to write a professional email” are the top classes.
“A lot of times, an employer just tells us, ‘Get us someone that shows up to work and we can train them,’” Stewart said.
