MSCC President Joins State Panel for Sept. 23 Workforce Summit

Mid-South Community College President Dr. Glen Fenter will be among the featured speakers at the “Jobs NOW: Arkansas Works When We Do Summit” scheduled for Sept. 23 in Little Rock.

The event, to be held in the Governor’s Hall at the Statehouse Convention Center, will focus on statewide efforts to improve Arkansas’s workforce.

Dr. Fenter will join Joe Quinn, Senior Director of Public Affairs and Government Relations, Walmart, Inc., and Chris Masingill, Federal Co-Chairman, Delta Regional Authority, for an afternoon breakout session.

According to Andrew M. Parker, Director of Governmental Affairs for the Arkansas State Chamber and Associated Industries of Arkansas, the summit is expected to draw more than 1,000 educators, public servants, and business/industry leaders. Organizers are hoping for a minimum of 10 people from all of Arkansas’s 75 counties.

The Summit brings together national leaders in the manufacturing, construction, trucking and agriculture industries as well as representatives of the state’s economic development, education, and workforce communities.

Participants will discuss the impact the “skills gap” crisis is having on the State and its industries, and will highlight partnerships created, solutions found and successes achieved in pockets of Arkansas.

In Arkansas today, 49 percent of skilled-trade workers are 45 and older, and nearly 18 percent are between the ages of 55 and 64. In addition, two in three parents feel that a career requiring a skilled trade is not for their child, and fewer and fewer children are considering these career paths as a respectable option.

This national “skills gap” accounts for 600,000 high-wage-earning jobs left unfilled across the U.S., including tens of thousands of those jobs in Arkansas.

“With each passing decade, this Gap will only widen,” says the Arkansas Jobs Now website (http://www.arjobsnow.com). “This dilemma hinders Arkansas’s growth potential and hurts Arkansas’s businesses, cities, towns and people. NOW is the time that Arkansans fix Arkansas’s Skills Gap problem.”

Other speakers/presenters/moderators will include Randy Zook, President & CEO, Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce; Gov. Mike Beebe; Jennifer McNelly, President & CEO, the Manufacturing Institute; Ted Abernathy, Managing Partner, Economic Leadership & Economic Advisor to Southern Governor’s Association; Phil Simon, Global Technical & Product Training, John Deere Company; Steve Williams, President & CEO, Maverick Transportation, Inc.; Bill Hannah, Chairman of the Board, Nabholz Construction Services, Inc.; Roby Brock, Talk Business & Politics; and Dr. Willard Daggett, Founder & Chairman, International Center for Leadership in Education Summit registration is available at www.arjobsnow.com, and the fee is $35.

In 2009, Dr. Fenter, MSCC’s Dr. Gibson “Sunny Morris, and Arkansas Association of Two-Year College’s Dr. Ed Franklin, teamed up for presentation at a similar summit.

Fenter, Morris, and Franklin presented “State Sector Strategies: Regional Solutions to Address Skill Needs” to cap a day dedicated to delivering practical, demand-driven solutions for today’s workforce challenges.

Their presentation focused on the Arkansas Delta Training and Education Consortium (ADTEC) effort to target the primary economies of eastern Arkansas: agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and transportation, distribution, and logistics.

ADTEC includes MSCC, Arkansas Northeastern College, Arkansas State University-Newport, East Arkansas Community College, and Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas.