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Metro Denver WIRED Initiative
Q&A with Ledy Garcia-Eckstein,
Executive director of the Metro Denver Wired Region
Q: Describe this region’s beginnings.
A: In our Metro Denver region we had the beginning of a working region, because in the economic development arena the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation (Metro Denver EDC) already represented all nine counties. So before WIRED, there was already an entity at the economic development level that acted on behalf of the region. In the workforce system, there hadn’t been this regional perspective. Within the year just prior to WIRED, a group of the region’s workforce directors came together to begin discussions, and they eventually created the Workforce Board of Metro Denver. This Board is not a traditional WIB, but a regional workforce council where the directors come together and discuss how to serve the region’s employers and job seekers more effectively.
WIRED is what has made people focus on growth industries and the Metro Denver EDC’s industry cluster research. There are industries in our region that are really growing, but have significant labor shortages. The bioscience cluster is really growing and so is aerospace. We are now second in the country for private sector aerospace employment.
Q: Are you finding more interest in regional economies from the partnership of the education and business community?
A: We are definitely seeing it. It has started with small pockets, but the business community is realizing that they’re going to have to be involved in order to get the workers they need. You also see a lot of bi-partisanship around this issue. For instance the Denver Metro Chamber is very engaged in education and understands that this is one of the top issues that face Colorado. It’s everything from high school drop-out and graduation rates, to the number of kids who go on to higher education; and making sure that those who don’t go on to higher education still have skills preparing them for the workforce. So this is absolutely dear to their hearts, because they know that it is the only way that we can keep our business competitive.
Q: The tag line for WIRED is talent driving prosperity. How do you see that?
A: This is so true in Colorado because we have high-skilled jobs and serious concerns from business about where the skilled workforce will come from. We have the newly created United Launch Alliance and many other developments happening in aerospace, and our other industries. They need talent. They need engineers. They need technicians. We have a bioscience industry cluster that is growing and needs highly skilled people. We have all kinds of job opportunities in IT. There are significant shortages in the GIS field, which encompasses both IT and aerospace, and supports our other industries. When we meet with companies they want to know how quickly we can get them people with these high skills. And then there’s energy. A balanced energy economy, including extractive and renewable industries, is a huge part of the Colorado economy and will continue to be for many years to come. People say we are going to be the Silicon Valley of renewable energy. We have natural gas; we have oil – particularly on the Western slope of Colorado; we are one of the windiest states and we are sunny, so we have lots of opportunities with solar. We were recently visited by a delegation from Spain, led by Spain’s deputy Minister of Energy, that was interested in investing in wind energy. The delegation was very impressed with what it saw.
Vestas, a Danish company that manufactures wind blades, moved to Colorado because of the prospects here and the region’s drive to develop resources in this area. We want to be big. All of these companies have a need for talent. It is talent that counts, and so it is our highly educated workforce that is going to drive our region’s prosperity. That is the WIRED message, and it is so evident in our region.
Q: You’re about a year and a half into this -- What’s your biggest challenge? And what is your biggest aha?
A: I think our biggest challenge in many ways has to be the way we structured the grant. It’s taken a lot of time to get the projects up and running, and it has to do with the way we structured it. WIRED funding is dispersed from the U.S. Department of Labor to the Colorado Department of Labor - that’s how all the WIRED grants work. However, for our region, the Colorado Department of Labor distributes the funds to the City and County of Denver, because it wrote the grant on behalf of the region. The City and County of Denver then turned over administration of all programs to the Metro Denver EDC as the entity representing the region. So the City and County of Denver, which wrote the grant, competes with everyone else for funds.
Q: What has been your aha?
A: I think it has been a series of “ahas”. For me, it has been being able to get the education folks working with the workforce system to focus on the regional industry cluster analyses developed by the Metro Denver EDC. When I worked for the workforce system, we had great relationships with health care employers. We prepared a lot of people for health care, and for a number of other industries. I think that needs to continue to happen, but I’ll admit that I had seldom looked at the research that was being done on a regional level to prepare people for regional jobs. So that has been one of our greatest accomplishments. And now there’s a strong regional focus on this issue that also includes the Department of Education, the Governor’s office with their own National Governor’s Association Stem Grant, and the commissioner of higher education. All of these people are really thinking about jobs in aerospace and other industries, and are working together on what we can do to prepare people for these jobs.
Q: Three or four years done the road when the initial grant is gone what do you want the WIRED legacy to be?
A: We think about that all the time -- What does sustainability look like? What does transformation look like? What I would like to see embedded in our region as a result of WIRED is that the work of economic development, the workforce system and regional educational entities continue to come together. I want these new regional groups to say: “Ok. What are the jobs right now? What is the research showing us that we need to do to get there?” There will be other growth industries that emerge, and I’d like to see the same kind of process we are using now become standard practice, so that those workforce, education and industry partnerships continue the WIRED model of working together in support of the regional economy.
To me, the most important thing is that our companies find the best people for the best jobs locally -- from our region’s universities, technical schools, and community colleges. I hope we will have achieved our goal of “growing our own” through building the capacity of our local institutions, so that the best jobs go to people from Colorado, while at the same time continuing to attract people from other parts of the country. I think attracting the best and brightest to a region is always an excellent economic development strategy, and it’s an approach taken by many other parts of the country. I hope we will continue to do that also, but not at the expense of the people who grew up here. We want to continue to attract the best and the brightest, but many of those best and brightest are home grown -- from our K-12 system, from our community colleges and our universities.”
Q: When you’re developing skilled talent, how do you make sure you include less advantaged people?
A: It is always an issue, because for a lot of the industries in our region it is very much about the demand for very high skilled workers. So what we have done at both the high school and post secondary levels on all our requests for proposals, is give extra points to those working with disadvantaged populations. We have also specified underrepresented populations as a target group because we want to see more women going into aerospace and engineering, etc. So we make sure that our projects have good representation among participants, particularly in our region’s urban and rural high schools. The majority of our projects funded to date include an element that is geared towards underrepresented populations. In the future, we’d like to see engineering academies at the high-school level which would also be an effective way of targeting these populations.
We need highly skilled workers and cannot address our target industries’ workforce needs if we don’t include less advantaged and underrepresented populations. We need to raise the skill levels of children of immigrants and students in urban and rural schools. We need everyone in this region.
