Building A Better Workforce

Building a Better Workforce, a conference held in the MassMutual Room of the Basketball Hall of Fame in November, attracted 200 participants from the region's business, educaation and public policy communities and addressed the link between educational attainment - from pre-kindergarten through college and adult education - and a healthy local economy.

Nobel Laureate Dr. James Heckman, from the Center of Economic Research at the University of Chicago, spoke to attendees about the importance of investing in early education. Dr. Heckman cited a long-running study indicating that children who spent 2 ¹/₂ hours a day in pre-school programs and whose families received home visits realized lifelong benefits. These participants had increase IQs, were more likely to graduate high school, and experienced greater wage earning by age 40.

Cherish Every Child and partners from the business community hosted a conference on Monday, November 19, Building Better Workforce: A Business Conference for Western Massachusetts. At this conference, 200 business leaders heard from Dr. James J. Heckman, Nobel Laureate in Economics from the University of Chicago, who presented the economic case for investing in young children, as well as Dr. Paul Harrington from the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies who discussed the status of the region’s workforce.

Because we know it is increasingly difficult for businesses, large and small, to find employees in the Western Massachusetts marketplace with appropriate skills, we collaborated with partners including MassMutual Financial Group, Verizon, the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts, the Regional Employment Board, Pioneer Valley Planning Commission and the region’s chambers of commerce on this event, whose goal was to tie education to economic development.

Building a Better Workforce offered a road map with current and future implications: how early education and a range of initiatives in the region from pre-kindergarten through adult literacy programs, as well as vocational training, will yield a more educated and more skilled workforce.

To read Dr. Harrington’s presentation...

To read Dr. Heckman’s presentation...

The conference was featured on the front page of The Republican on Tuesday, November 20. Read more...

BusinessWest also featured an article on the conference. Read more...

View some of the presentation videos online at www.wgby.org/workforce.