Companies considering moving to a new location or expanding existing operations prioritize one factor above all others when making the decision. It’s not infrastructure, transportation, climate or even the tax environment; it’s the skilled, available workforce and supportive workforce development ecosystem.

CEOs know that the success of their company depends on having a trained, engaged and prepared workforce that can grow and adapt along with the business. Whether it’s a remote tech or an assembly line worker, companies depend on a workforce that shows up every day with the knowledge, skills, and desire to do the job well.

This is too critical to be left to chance. Before deciding on a move or expansion, companies will research the potential workforce, including the education levels of the population; educational infrastructure (universities, community colleges, work training programs); numbers of employers and workers in the relevant field(s); demographic trends; and more. If their research reveals critical shortcomings in the workforce, companies will look elsewhere.

How EDOs help

Regional economic development organizations (EDOs) can play an important role in workforce development. They are almost always involved in company recruitment efforts, collaborating with the various local governments involved and providing economic, educational, and demographic data. But they don’t have to settle for merely sharing workforce data – they can inform it and improve it.

That’s what we do at greater:SATX, the EDO for an eight-county region centered in San Antonio, Texas, one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. With more than 1,200 new job postings each month and a projected 6% increase in demand for skilled workers through 2025, we needed an approach that would fill these roles and provide high-quality jobs for our residents.

As a public-private partnership, we have been successful in attracting new businesses and fostering expansion of existing ones, but we realized that if we wanted to continue to attract companies and investment, we needed to do more to develop the talent pipeline that businesses look for.

We found the framework that best fit our region’s needs by deploying the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management® (TPM). Working with employers and our region’s education and workforce development partners, TPM provides data and employer demand-driven strategies and tools to develop short-, mid-, and long-term talent pipeline solutions.

The TPM model isn’t a short-term project to fill vacancies in a single business or industry, but a long-term investment in aligning our workforce and education training with our current and projected industry demand with the goal of developing strategies that will produce a skilled and sustainable workforce.

TPM workforce readiness model

In collaboration with our public and private partners and after studying the region’s strengths and growth areas, our workforce development team decided to implement the TPM framework in five economic sectors, all areas in which greater San Antonio has a strong foundation and the potential to grow even more:

• Advanced Manufacturing
• Healthcare and Bioscience
• Financial Services
• IT & Cybersecurity
• Construction and Skilled Trades

We were the first to scale implementation of TPM across five sectors within the first year, a bold decision that will have a tremendous impact on workforce readiness for our region in these industries.

Here’s how TPM works. We formed an industry collaborative for each of the five sectors involving nearly 100 regional employers and trade associations across all 5 industries. Each collaborative meets over a 9- to 12-month period to discuss critical roles, align competencies and skillsets, and work with training providers to develop strategies and tactics that will address short-, mid-, and long-term talent needs. These could include career awareness and exploration, sector-based marketing and recruiting, training, and curriculum alignment.

The next steps for the collaborative are to continue refining the career pathways to include an analysis of the competencies and skillsets needed for entry-level customer service roles. The group will then identify and develop successful internal, external, and needed programs to accelerate the quality of career progress. In this way, our EDO and partners in TPM can help ensure that the region’s burgeoning financial services sector will have a critical supply of employees to fill roles from entry level on up.

Results

Though TPM implementation just began in 2022, early results are so promising that our team was invited to present at last year’s U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s annual TPM National Learning Network Summit.

TPM is not the only workforce program supported by greater:SATX. We help regional employers plug into San Antonio Ready to Work, a $200 million, voter-approved education and job placement program. Ready to Work provides a variety of training and support for unemployed and underemployed San Antonio residents to help them earn degrees, certificates and credentials that will let them land better-paying, in-demand jobs. Our TPM work is directly aligned and informs the occupations that San Antonio Ready to Work is focused on for training and upskilling to ensure their employability into high-growth, high-wage jobs.

The construction of a new plant or corporate headquarters anywhere is often celebrated with a groundbreaking ceremony where political and business leaders turn over some clods of dirt with gold-bladed shovels. San Antonio is no exception in this regard, but we know the real groundwork – the preparation that makes the announcement possible – is done years beforehand with the creation of a talented and available workforce that attracts the company’s facilities and HQs in the first place. We understand the new EDO model is more than groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings and involves the comprehensive work to round out a region’s offering to include an aligned and ready workforce.

San Antonio aims to be known as the “new talent capital of the U.S.” and the TPM program is helping us get there. As proud as we are of what we’ve accomplished, we’re not unique. EDOs in other regions can also be a vital part of creating a future-ready workforce.

Romanita Matta-Barrera is the Chief Business Advancement Officer at greater:SATX Regional Economic Partnership. In this role, Romanita leads the organization’s integrated regional business support through local business engagement, retention and expansion, workforce development, and targeted economic advocacy and influence.