These States Found a Way to Train the Workforce They Need to Attract Jobs
Alabama and Virginia are proving that targeted, employer-driven training beats a college diploma.
America’s K-12 education system leaves much to be desired when it comes to preparing graduates for gainful employment in their local economy. Even in rural areas where more students often need career and technical training than college preparatory classes, college prep still takes precedence.
Nicole Smith, a professor and economist at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, has observed that poor college counseling often leads students to acquire credit hours without gaining a useful degree as opposed to a useful apprenticeship.
Even Elon Musk has commented that his companies “SpaceX and Tesla have noticed a meaningful degradation in the capability of US college graduates over the past several years.”
SpaceX and Tesla have noticed a meaningful degradation in the capability of US college graduates over the past several years
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2023
To fill the gap between knowledge gained and skills needed today, many states have crafted job-training programs tailored to the types of companies they want to recruit. Alabama's Industrial Development Training program (AIDT) and Virginia's Talent Accelerator Program (VTAP) stand out. They recruit, screen, and train a company’s workforce at no cost to the company or worker.
This comes from the same principle as using tax abatements, deferrals, and exemptions to attract businesses to expand or relocate. Many companies are hesitant to invest in an area because of the cost of training a local workforce. These programs do it for them.
Alabama’s Manufacturing Advantage
The development-focused publication Business Facilities consistently ranks Alabama in the top five states in its customized workforce training category. This is largely due to AIDT, which trains Alabama-based companies workers on-site, virtually, and remotely. Since its creation in 1971, AIDT has trained nearly a million workers.
Its Robotics Technology Park (RTP) in Huntsville and its Maritime Training Center (MTC) in Mobile are its primary success drivers.
The RTP is staffed by leading robotics companies’ employees. It also maintains a mobile lab that visits K-12 schools to raise awareness among students about careers in the robotics industry. This undoubtedly played a role in Mazda choosing Huntsville out of over 300 possible locations to open its first manufacturing facility in the United States since 2012. Within two years of opening in 2021, the $2.3 billion facility reached its 4,000-worker commitment and has the capacity to produce 300,000 cars per year.
The MTC focuses on training Alabama residents for careers in shipbuilding and the maritime industry. The 67,000-square-foot facility delivers industry-specific programs like structural welding and fitting. Mobile-based Austal USA, the Navy’s only shipbuilder to provide both aluminum and steel ships, provides instructors to the MTC to teach students “the ins and outs of shipbuilding.”
Virginia’s Gold Standard Job Training Program
Last year, Area Development magazine ranked Virginia number one in the country in job training, and the Business Facilities Ranking Report has ranked VTAP the best job training program in the country for three years in a row.
Like AIDT, VTAP designs programs around a company's products and offers employee training free of charge. Unlike Alabama’s system, it is integrated with the Virginia community college system, which allows VTAP to utilize the facilities at the state’s 23 community colleges.
Since its launch in 2019 by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, VTAP has helped secure more than 17,000 jobs in the state. It focuses heavily on training in biotech, IT, and advanced manufacturing—industries common throughout the state.
What makes both AIDT and VTAP work so well is that neither is generic. Neither is trying to produce Renaissance men and women as is often the goal at four-year colleges.
AIDT reflects Alabama's manufacturing and industrial identity, while VTAP reflects Virginia's technology and biotech concentration. Both are trying to produce a worker ready to enter the jobsite of the type of industry each state knows it can attract most easily.
In today’s high-tech industrial economy, high schools should be reforming themselves to attach to statewide programs like VTAP is attached to Virginia’s community colleges. This would prepare graduates to enter the workforce immediately upon high school graduation just as they did before widespread outsourcing destroyed the country’s manufacturing base.
The federal government doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel to bolster programs like AIDT and VTAP. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act already offers federal dollars to states for job training tied to their specific economies. As it stands, the law primarily helps struggling areas in the hopes of uplifting them. This doesn’t have to end, but it would be a thriftier use of taxpayer dollars to scale what states have already taken initiative to create and to encourage imitation.
A high school diploma was never a guarantee of workplace readiness. But in the low-tech industrial economy of yesteryear, an individual didn’t need as much on-site training to become a competent worker. K-12 prepared him to be a competent adult, and industrial companies could afford to do the rest. That is no longer the case. It’s time for the federal government to reward states that have recognized this and to incentivize others to follow suit.
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