Sioux Falls looks within for worker answers

A knock on the door sent Jeffrey Irving’s life spinning out of control.

Cops, there to arrest him for allowing drugs to be sold from his Wagner home.

Soon he was sitting in prison with a felony conviction forever on his record.

Three years later, Irving is working on a new start in Sioux Falls. The recently released inmate was among the first participants in a city-funded program that helps connect non-violent ex-cons with job opportunities.

The city is not betting on the program out of any altruistic obligation to help rehabilitate criminals. Instead, officials see people like Irving as an important piece of the solution to one of the city’s biggest economic challenges: growing its workforce.

The program helping Irving, run by job placement firm Employment Edge with a $25,000 city grant, is among half a dozen efforts the city bet on last year as part of a homegrown workforce development strategy. Together, the awards reflect a realization at City Hall that Sioux Falls can't recruit enough workers to meet employers’ growing needs, and that keeping up will require helping existing residents reach their full potential.

City makes bet on workforce ideas

On Friday, Irving signed paperwork to become a full-time employee at Scott’s Lumber — something that wouldn’t have happened without the program.

“You go to 100 other places and it’s, ‘No, you’re a felon,’” Irving said.

Other efforts that received grants included programs that offer workplace skills and other training to refugees and immigrants. Another aims to expose students and others to construction trades, and another is funding a long-term market study. Altogether, the city gave out a little more than $300,000.

“You can’t just keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect better results,” said Darrin Smith, Sioux Falls Community Development Director.

For years Sioux Falls economic development efforts have invested in recruitment to help bridge the gap between employers and the workers they need. They’ve used advertising. They’ve used social media. They’ve used travel writers. All to get the word out about Sioux Falls and what it has to offer.

While those efforts help some, they haven’t put a dent in the city’s perpetually low unemployment, which can scare off employers considering relocating to Sioux Falls.

“We are seeing no slowdown in the number of people moving here, but we’re also still hearing from the business community that their biggest challenge is workforce,” Smith said.

Of the thousands of people who relocate to Sioux Falls every year, most come from rural parts of South Dakota or neighboring states. As those communities’ populations have declined, though, opportunity to tap those places for recruitment dwindle as well, Smith said.

Sioux Falls also has natural barriers keeping people from moving here. Cold winters and stereotypes about life on the high plains can make southeast South Dakota a tough sell to those unfamiliar with it.

Grants help dozens of immigrants find work

The inability to outgrow Sioux Falls’ worker shortage has the city putting more effort than ever before toward training and developing people who are already here.

The city’s community development office last year unveiled a $500,000 workforce development pilot grant program. After receiving more than $2 million worth of ideas, six schools, nonprofits and businesses were ultimately awarded money.

Since rebounding from last decade's recession, Sioux Falls has shattered development records as the local economy surged. That also came with unemployment rates hovering between 2 and 4 percent.

“When unemployment is low, you just don’t have the flexibility to ignore populations that are sometimes on the margin,” said Kermit Kaleba, federal policy director for the National Skills Coalition in Washington, D.C. "You're not going to be able to grow your way out of it — you need some form of specialized training."

That’s why the city awarded the workforce grants it did, Smith said. The preliminary results include dozens of people who have received job training or placement and hundreds more exposed to potential opportunities.

Irving is one of more than 40 people with criminal pasts who found work through Employment Edge’s program at an average of $12.30 per hour. The agency used its grant to hire a full-time coordinator to do outreach between potential employers and felons looking for a second chance.

Kent Alberty, an owner at Employment Edge, said the company primarily serves manufacturing, warehouse and office-type businesses — industries that tend to be a good fit for workforce re-entry and that are heavily impacted by the area’s worker shortage.

Even with workers in short supply, some employers have reservations about hiring people with criminal records. But Alberty said its coordinator has been able to help ease the concerns of more than 100 local businesses.

A different set of challenges come with preparing immigrants and refugees with the skills needed to find work. The number of foreign-born residents in the city more than doubled since 2000. Some see that as an opportunity to fill some of the estimated 3,000 available jobs open in Sioux Falls.

Mobile construction labs expose thousands to trades

But it’s not easy. Christy Nicolaisen, director of the Sioux Falls Multi-Cultural Center, said immigrants often only know the professional etiquette they learned in their countries of origin. Eye contact and firm handshakes, for example, are fundamental practices when interviewing with a potential employer in the United States. But that’s not the case in other parts of the world.

“When you come from a country where a respectful handshake is soft, and you come here … there’s that unconscious thought (among employers) of, ‘I don’t know if I can trust them.’ It’s also with eye contact,” Nicolaisen said.

The Multi-Cultural Center, along with Training Solutions Institute last year, received more than $100,000 in city grants to help bridge those culture gaps and since has trained more than 125 people with the soft-skills needed to have a successful interview in the local job market. Nicolaisen said at least 55 of their clients are now averaging an hourly wage of $12 thanks to the program.

City Councilors who authorized the pilot program and economic development experts alike say the immediate returns are encouraging, but it’s only one element of making meaningful progress toward developing a strong workforce. Comprehensive, long-term solutions are also needed to keep up the momentum.

Some of the grant money is doing that. About $16,000 allowed Sioux Empire Society for Human Resource Management to bring together more than 100 employers and hiring specialists for a community-wide workforce development conference. Conversations are centered around employee engagement and bridging the needs of today with the needs of tomorrow.

Forward Sioux Falls, a partnership of the Sioux Falls Development Foundation and the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce, is in the beginning of what’s being called a Strategic Workforce Action Agenda, which developed 11 key initiatives aimed at readying a future workforce, including a cradle-to-career initiative with the Sioux Falls School District.

“Our future isn’t just in six months," Councilor Dean Karsky said. "It’s in 10 years and 20 years and 30 years, and if we don't have a plan to get there, this six months really won’t matter.”

Workforce Development Grants

Training Solutions Institute at Southeast Technical Institute used its $99,000 city grant to provide more language and job skills training for immigrant and ethnic populations. Thirty-five program participants are in the process of getting trained on using a forklift, obtaining a commercial driver’s license and basic construction and welding skills. The program wraps up in February.

Similar to the workforce development efforts at STI, the Multi-Cultural Center of Sioux Falls so far has used about half of its available $70,000 to provide workforce training, such as learning how to fill out employment applications, understanding what’s expected of workplace behavior and other soft skills for more than 90 immigrants and refugees. Existing workforce training programs at the Multi-Cultural Center were only offered to individuals who met certain state and federal income assistance requirements. The pilot opened the training up to the entire immigrant and refugee community.

A partnership between the Home Builders Association of the Sioux Empire, Associated General Contractors of South Dakota and Sioux Empire Manufacturers used $50,000 to create three mobile training labs to promote jobs in the construction industry. The training labs – mobile trailers featuring concrete and carpentry equipment and a heavy equipment simulator – were exposed to more than 1,000 attendees of local job fairs and used by more than 150 participants.

Forward Sioux Falls used its $50,000 city grant to develop what’s being called a “Strategic Workforce Action Agenda.” The program is bringing together community stakeholders to create a “cradle-to-career” coalition and workforce programming to support targeted regional populations.

Sioux Empire Society for Human Resource Management used about half of its $34,000 grant to host a community-wide workforce development conference that was attended by more than 115 city stakeholders.

Employment Edge is using its $25,000 to put recently released, non-violent offenders into the workforce. Employment Edge so far has screened, marketed and placed more than 40 individuals in positions of employment since its program launched. The people the organization helped obtain employment are earning an average wage of $12.30 per hour.