Watson Wire: Changing the Paradigm

During a KAZI radio interview last May, Alberta Phillips asked me about what we’re doing to ensure everyone in our community can be a part of our supercharged local economy.

It’s a fair question. And it’s a fundamental question that speaks to so many of the challenges we’re facing as a community, particularly equity and affordability.

I worry a lot about generational inequity. I don’t want us to be the first generation that fails to create the opportunity for those coming behind us to be a full part of Austin — living here, building families and making friends here, sharing their voices here, building wealth here — in Austin. It’s easy to be distracted by our current success so that we don’t look at whether the next generation and the ones after that are going to be able to love this place and succeed in this place. That’s why we’re shifting our economic development paradigm to focus unapologetically and relentlessly on making sure Austinites have the access, training and education to take advantage of the ample opportunity Austin provides.

Today, we’re taking an important step toward addressing those challenges by ensuring that Austinites have the means to create careers and financial security for their families as part of the $25 billion investment in mobility infrastructure coming our way through Project Connect, airport expansion, I-35 reconstruction, and other infrastructure projects.

With these projects, we’ll be building more than just light rail, bridges and an airport. We can also be building and lifting up Austin’s people and their families for generations to come.

Moving Forward

To understand the talent needed to deliver these enormous mobility programs, I called on Workforce Solutions Capital Area to help us do something that hasn’t been done before in Austin— create a comprehensive needs analysis and workplan. It verifies that mobility and infrastructure aren’t just areas of work supporting the economy—those jobs are an economic development sector themselves.

We unveiled that research today at a Mobility & Infrastructure Summit that has brought together more than 100 infrastructure job creators as well as educators and labor leaders involved with workforce training. We also had local government officials there, including folks from Capital Metro and the Austin Transit Partnership, who have committed to carrying our plans forward.

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Here are some of the key takeaways from the research:

• Planned large capital projects will create 10,000 mobility and infrastructure jobs annually, double the number expected under business as usual;

• An annual training gap of 4,000 workers will exacerbate existing skills shortages, meaning that training programs will need to be scaled and connected; and

• Women make up only 14 percent of the mobility and infrastructure workforce currently but could provide a significant share of the workers needed.

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These jobs have low barriers to entry but can lead to sustainable career pathways. First, we need to identify and remove the obstacles, such as access to affordable child care, that prevent jobseekers from pursuing these jobs and participating in training. As part of the federal infrastructure law, there’s a lot of workforce development funding that can be used for things like child care. One goal of this summit is to get all the state and local government partners to work in concert to pursue this funding.

We must coordinate, anticipate, plan for and then build the capacity to provide the local talent for these infrastructure projects that are creating good jobs that can lead to life-long careers. This strategy will bring resources to the workers to support them, including access to skill-building training, childcare, and connections to good jobs that are essential to Austin’s future.

And instead of measuring economic success based solely on the number of jobs created, we will also measure it by how many local people can fill those jobs and build their careers so they can afford to live in their city and community while improving mobility for all of us.?