Many of Vermont’s fastest-growing occupations are among the lowest paying — a reality that challenges some of the state’s goals for workforce development. (See charts below.)
On one hand, lawmakers want to encourage skill acquisition and the growth of high-paying positions. The higher the skill level, the more a job tends to pay and the more valuable that position becomes for the state.
On the other hand, there aren’t many high-paying jobs on Vermont’s fastest-growing list. The most openings projected into 2014 are for cashiers, retail salespeople and personal care aides.
While revamping the state’s workforce development programs in a signature bill for the 2014 session, members of the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development are bumping up against this discrepancy.
With a limited pool of money, they are weighing the relative value of helping people who already have good jobs move up the ladder, compared to helping the unemployed or underemployed get any traction at all.
“They’re not competing policy objectives,” said Rep. Paul Ralston, D-Middlebury, after a long and sometimes tense committee discussion Friday afternoon. “They’re just two different policy objectives.”
Lawmakers’ task, Chair Bill Botzow, D-Bennington, repeated several times, is to strike a balance between the two.
Rep. Lynn Dickinson, R-St. Albans, commented after the discussion that they go hand-in-hand.
“You have to sometimes move someone up,” she said, “to open up a slot for someone who’s unemployed to move into.”
Ralston said it’s admirable to write aspirational goals into criteria for workforce development programs that receive state funding. One example is to require any state-funding programs to train people for jobs that pay twice the prevailing minimum wage.
But sometimes any job is better than none, he said, even if it’s not so high paying.
“When our aspirations are out of alignment with reality, we hamper our ability to actually influence change,” Ralston said.
The House Commerce Committee will continue hashing out its draft workforce development bill, H.852, in the coming days.
Aside from balancing between assistance for job entry and skills acquisition and several other balancing acts, their goal also is to provide for more coordination among the state’s many programs, Botzow said.
Meanwhile the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs is working on its own workforce legislation, S.220, which Chair Kevin Mullin, R-Rutland, said recently will likely incorporate some aspects of the House legislation.
Data
The charts below show estimated average wages and projected job openings for many professions in Vermont.
When comparing the job openings, Department of Labor economist Mat Barewicz points out that it’s important to keep in mind that less skilled jobs are more often lumped together than highly specialized fields. For example, cashiers are considered “cashiers” whether they work in a retail shop or food service, whereas engineers or doctors may be grouped into many different occupations depending on their specialty.
