CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Governor Earl Ray Tomblin will talk about the progress West Virginia’s Workforce Planning Council, a development group he reestablished and reshaped in 2013, has made in the past two years during Tuesday’s Governor’s Workforce Summit.
“We’ve torn down a lot of the silos and, basically, everybody that has anything to do with education or workforce training, workforce development, we’re all sitting around the table and we’re working together,” Tomblin said on Monday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
“That’s the way we maximize our dollars.”
The event will include a comprehensive review of the state’s workforce development efforts, including an overview of new initiatives to “meet the educational needs of our workforce and the training needs of new and expanding businesses investing in the Mountain State.”
Career preparations, Tomblin said, must start early — possibly as early as junior high school. “We need to get them focused early on and keep them focused on what they would like to do,” he said.
As for those looking for new skills, “Everybody knows what the other one’s offering now and (we’re) working as a team to do everything we can to get people who are not working, to get them interested in it, to get them back into some training, so they can be productive citizens of West Virginia,” Tomblin said.
In 2013, Tomblin expanded the Workforce Planning Council as part of education reforms to include several cabinet secretaries and personally chairs its monthly meetings.
First Lady Joanne Jaeger Tomblin will be part of Tuesday’s Governor’s Workforce Summit along with state Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette, state Community and Technical College System Chancellor Jim Skidmore, members of the West Virginia Workforce Planning Council and others.
The summit is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at BridgeValley Community & Technical College’s Advanced Technology Center in South Charleston.
It will be streamed online at Tomblin’s state website.