Commercial Appeal - A skilled workforce could be an elixir for many of this community's economic ills

A constant theme of the Memphis and Shelby County mayors and Greater Memphis Chamber leadership is that if Memphis and Shelby County expect to attract high-paying jobs, it is imperative that this community have a skilled workforce.

Educators also have bought into that goal, putting initiatives in place to graduate either job-ready or college-ready students.

A story Sunday in The Commercial Appeal’s Business section talked about how this change in thinking for the 21st century job market is a realization that a good career in a high-skills job can be as fulfilling as a good career in a job that requires a college degree.

Sunday’s story told about a group of East High School students who toured medical device manufacturer Smith & Nephew’s plant, where they learned about good-paying advanced manufacturing jobs that require skills that do not necessarily have to be gained through a college degree.

Friday, by the way, was National Manufacturing Day.

We have used this space in the past to talk a lot about what a skilled workforce would mean for this city, and how not having one has cost of us dearly in terms of attracting the kinds of jobs that pay salaries and benefits that let people buy homes, which helps the tax base, and live a middle-class lifestyle.

Right now, Greater Memphis has seen an uptick in manufacturing jobs, but many of those jobs are not paying the kind of salaries that promote that type of lifestyle.

Officials say that will change once we can show economic development prospects that we have the skilled workers they need.

That fact certainly helped northeast Mississippi land a Toyota vehicle assembly plant.

Locally, the good news is that Shelby County Schools, the chamber, Southwest Tennessee Community College in Memphis, Mid-South Community College in West Memphis, along with city and county government, are collaborating on various initiatives to give people the skills they need to compete for advanced manufacturing, logistics and other jobs that need high-skilled workers.

Southwest got some good news on the job-training front Monday when U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., announced the college had won $4.05 million in federal funding from the U.S. Department of Labor to develop and expand career training programs in the health care, transportation and logistics industries.

What Southwest is doing meshes with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s Tennessee Promise program, where Tennessee high school graduates will be able to attend a state two-year college tuition-free, earning an associate degree in a particular field or continue on to a four-year institution.

A skilled workforce is not a cure for all the economic problems plaguing this community, but it will be a heck of an elixir for most of them.