Gold Collar Workers
Present Golden Opportunities
Think of gold-collar workers as a lifeline. Since the only constant
in the choppy waters of competition is change, to stay afloat your people must
be intelligent and creative enough to solve complex problems, to engage
technical skills, and to apply cross-functional knowledge of the workplace.
These characteristics define the gold-collar worker. It’s clear that rapidly
changing technology and an international business environment have profoundly
shifted competitive advantage from brawn to brain in today’s Information Age.
It is this gold-collar working class that will generate the majority of Lancaster
County’s productivity, which will increase in direct proportion with the equity
the county’s workers hold in the form of applicable, competitive knowledge.
Professor Robert Kelley of Carnegie Mellon University coined
the phrase “the gold-collar worker” in his book of the same title. Kelley
described a new era of workers whose value is brainpower and used “gold” to
reflect the handsome wages and profits their minds and skills garnered. These
employees translate “… information into knowledge and knowledge into profits.”
When Kelley’s book was published in 1985, these workers were understood as
being young and college educated, and they specialized and accounted for over
40 percent of America’s workforce.
Today gold-collar workers account for 65 to 70 percent of
the workforce, and gold-collar careers in well-defined industries are the
fastest growing job segment. The term gold-collar worker, as opposed to gold-collar
job, is now applied much more broadly to describe highly skilled workers that
span generations, regions, and occupations and whose minds are not only molded by
college education but also through accreditation, certification, vocational, and
proprietary training, and even personal and career experiences.
“Gold-collar careers will be, at least for the next 15
years, the most sought after of all high-paying positions,” says Dean Bill
Thompson, EdD, of Harrisburg Area Community College’s
(HACC) Division of Business, Hospitality,
Engineering, Technology, & Computers. “I see them evolving. The gold-collar
careers of today will not be the ones of 10 years from now, but we will
continue to have gold-collar jobs, and common skills and core competencies
will remain fairly constant; it’s those highly specialized skills—the application
skills—that may differ.”
Gold-collar jobs offer clear career ladders in industries
with a potential for worker rewards tied to productivity and an expectation of
healthy growth over the next generation. A gold-collar worker can be a help
desk agent with an extensive high-tech background,
or a customer service representative hired because of an English degree, or the
LEED accredited professional on a builder’s staff. Gold-collar workers are
machinists and electrical technicians; equipment, tool, and die makers;
registered nurses and licensed practical nurses; automotive technicians and
network administrators. Gold-collar jobs are the tractor beam for gold-collar
workers.
For example, regardless of the present short-term business
cycle disturbances, Thompson adds, “Things in the computer and manufacturing areas will continue to be good choices, the IT area is excellent with
relatively high-paying jobs, and even in a particular
discipline—electronics for instance—an instrumentation specialist would
be in a relatively high-paid discipline of electronics.”
Education, Recession, and the Gold-Collar Employee
Today’s education and training model requires focus not just
on developing technical or scientific skills to sustain a lifetime of labor,
but also on producing multidisciplinary students who are nimble in order to
successfully ride—and carry their employers—over uncertain waves of
technology and globalization-induced cycles.
The emerging model of workforce development trains new
workers and retrains older adults by integrating primary and secondary
education fundamentals with higher education and ongoing training throughout
life. Colleges are addressing the citizen training of primary school, and high schools
are collaborating with tertiary educators on duel enrollment and articulation
programs. Traditional degree programs are expanding focus beyond a single
academic discipline by equipping students with additional skills not
historically covered such as business literacy, problem solving, and even confidence
in 21st century education delivery systems like online learning.
“We have to equip our students with the ability to
appreciate and master new technologies as they now change in ever-shorter life
cycles,” says Victor S. DeSantis, PhD, dean of
graduate studies and research at Millersville University. “We have to equip our
students to adapt, master, acquire new skills because the lifecycles of the
technologies are so much shorter than they were.”
If there’s a class of jobs on which to place your bets for
surviving the recession, it’s gold collar. In Kelley’s book, he draws attention
to unemployment rates during the recession of the early 1980s being 16.7 percent for blue-collar workers, 12 percent for
white-collar workers, and peaking at 3.2 percent for gold-collar workers. The gold-collar
workers’ skills set is so adaptable that job
security comes through their own professional competence, not reliance on a
company or prosperous economy.
The emerging question is not so much if the gold-collar
worker can stay afloat during the recession with available and secure jobs, but
rather will the gold-collar employer remain financially buoyant to keep
gold-collar workers educated and adequately compensated? Employers view the
recession through a kaleidoscope of variables: the ability to satisfy
customers’ needs despite cuts, the ability to maintain sufficient bottom line
to avoid gold-collar layoffs, and the ability to budget for ongoing education needed
to keep gold-collar workers progressive and productive in order to better serve
customers, entice prospects, boost the bottom line, and survive into the long
run.
Experts agree it’s too early to understand the recession’s
affect on gold-collar jobs, but there’s optimism that these jobs will trend with
innovation, not the economy. Furthermore, student enrollment increases in a
recession as people use time between jobs to retool skills or branch into new
professions, increasing their flexibility and employability.
“We live in a great county and region of the state that, for
the most part, is still a growth area when many other parts of the state are
declining in terms of job creation and job retention,” DeSantis points out. “We’re a stable, growing area, which is very lucky to be in the
year 2008. I would say that’s mainly because of the strength of Lancaster’s
business and industry sector. Particularly, I would point to [the balanced
diversification from] such sectors as agriculture and food, pharmaceuticals,
and other health-related sectors.”
The biggest promise for sustainable gold-collar careers is
green technology. Desperate measures to find solutions to environmental
problems are certain to carry an influx of new technology that commands new
skills and jobs; however, what those jobs are remains to be seen.
“Green technology presents a very broad spectrum of
careers—in anything from hazardous waste to alternative energies—but
there aren’t a whole lot of jobs in those areas yet,” HACC’s Thompson concludes. “But they will come in a flourish, and they will come heavy
and fast within the next five years.”
Colleges and training institutions report staying the course
with multidisciplinary approaches to programming and ensuring that tools and
resources necessary to support STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) disciplines along with literacy in economics and the
hard business sciences are cutting edge to equip future gold-collar students
with the skills to guide green ideas from concept to marketplace.
The gold-collar worker is also in the driver’s seat because
demand for these workers is outpacing supply and is causing serious concern
over a looming workforce shortage.
“If you look at the workforce and where it’s headed in the
future, there’s this perfect labor storm coming because of the skills sets that
are required, because more and more jobs require these skills, and because
we’re producing fewer people that have these skills, plus all the people that
are currently in those positions are about to retire,” explains William Griscom, president of Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology.
Griscom mentions that only 20 percent
of the workforce requires a four-year degree, with the 70 percent majority of
gold-collar careers requiring a two-year degree or equivalent, with some even
requiring more skills training than college education. Yet, the majority of high
school graduates today still believe that the only way to be successful is with
a bachelor’s degree. The result is a mismatch between skills obtained and
skills required and valued in the workplace. Adding to the gold-collar worker
shortage is a retiring generation of skilled workers.
Scott Sheely, executive director
of Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board, agrees and goes further by
saying, “Employers are experiencing that nearly every high-skill job is being
reinvented by technology. So what we are finding is that because of increasing
technology, there are increasing numbers of skills gaps. We talk about the
workforce shortage coming in the next 10 years, but what doesn’t get talked
about as much is a skills shortage. Employers need to be aware of this because
if you look at the number of people retiring in the next 10 years, it tends to
be the most skilled workers right now. If you don’t have some kind of a
pipeline to develop those workers, you’re going to be sitting without a skilled
workforce.”
What’s an Employer to Do?
“I was talking to different companies about programming and
things we are going to offer, and I get the sense that people are sitting on
their hands right now with a kind of wait-and-see attitude,” remarks Karen
Sheehe, PE, PHR, director of continuing education at Penn State Lancaster,
about the recession.
But just like a diversified portfolio and dollar-cost
averaging protects exposure to investment risk, diversified and ongoing training protects individuals and businesses from an uncertain business climate.
The bright side to the recession may be the capacity for workers to step away
from the production floor for training.
Sheehe agrees. “Typically when times are good, it’s not that
a company can’t afford to up-skill its workforce, it’s a matter of getting the
time to do it because they’re all working. I think now that things have
softened up for some companies, they have time, and they could give their
employees the time to up-skill, but the challenge now is the investment.”
Options do exist for companies willing to exercise a bit of
that gold-collar creativity in seeking funding sources or low-cost alternatives
for fostering a gold-collar workforce—and remember, it’s not just about
training existing employees, but also about staying connected to the pipeline
of qualified students.
Sheely discusses the Workforce Investment
Act’s Youth Council, which is the only required committee that a workforce
investment board must have. Youth Councils reach out to K-12 and ensure
educators have the most current information about career outlook, skills sets,
and required knowledge base for these skills and jobs.
“The Youth Council’s mandate is to work on the issue of
building a pipeline from school to work. If we don’t have pipeline from school
to work, then where are we going to be in the next 30 years in terms of having
the kinds of workers needed?
“Employers have to think about the timing and sequence of
all this— they have to do the incumbent worker training to get current
workers up to speed, but then they need to have this backup coming through the
pipeline to get additional people that will phase in behind that current line
of workers.”
• Participate on industry
advisory boards – Have a voice in defining curriculum and
advising on equipment that should be introduced to students and
on the techniques and applications that modern industry requires.
Call the training institution representatives for your area of
interest, identify yourself as being from industry, and express
your interest to serve on an advisory committee.
• Teach by example –
Regardless of the short-term challenges, allow interns and cooperative education
students into your business to experience real world, on-the-job training. Also
request to visit the classroom as a guest speaker or serve as adjunct faculty, particularly at community colleges and technical training schools.
Community colleges even look favorably at requests for 10 minutes at the
beginning of class to talk about job vacancies and recruit right in the
classroom.
• Connect with the Lancaster County
Workforce Investment Board (WIB) – Not only is the WIB a
wealth of information on regional labor trends and news, but it
also serves as a liaison to funding sources that support training.
• Take advantage of online
training – The Internet as a resource for training provides
cost-effective e-learning, can be done on the employees’ own time
and preference, and often provides training for as many staff you
can cram in front of the computer.
• Share internal knowledge –
Gold-collar workers are investments, so maximize their returns. Form study
groups within departments to share information about current work and things
managers and employees have read, heard, or studied on their own. When employees
participate in continuing education, require them to transfer the information
to the department or organization in a report or brief presentation. When
managers or employees read a relevant book or article, they should pass it on
to other staff so they can acquire the knowledge themselves.
Corporate Natural Selection
The business anchored by knowledge acquired through
education assumes the responsibility of ongoing training in order to ebb with
the fickle flow of the 21st century business environment. Technology,
globalization, and the recession create an uncertain, complex, and rapidly
changing ecosystem that no doubt will have businesses fighting for survival in
the coming months and years. It’s highly skilled, educated, clear-thinking, and
self-directed workers that will sustain Lancaster County in the Information
Age; brain over brawn determines business predominance.
Gold-collar workers are sharks for education and knowledge
and have thought their way to the top of the corporate food chain. Just like
any other, the business ecosystem reinforces survival of the productively
fittest. Regardless of business cycles, it is the nature of companies who
nurture gold-collar workers that thrive.
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