In the future, jobs might not be the problem in the Inland Empire

No, the challenge will be finding people qualified to fill those jobs, many of which will require a lot more than a high school diploma, according to a recent study.

Anyone familiar with the Inland Empire knows the region has a history of high unemployment, a problem that only got worse during the recession.

The region’s jobless rate was 8.3 percent in April, five percentage points higher than California’s unemployment rate, according to the state Employment Development Department.

At the peak of the recession, in early 2010, the two-county region’s jobless rate hit 14.6 percent. By comparison, the state’s unemployment rate never got higher than 12.4 percent during recession.

Historically, the Inland region’s problem has been easy to explain. It doesn’t create enough jobs, partly because a lot of employers would rather locate in the coastal counties, which have a larger and better-educated pool of employees to draw from and a higher standard of living.

All of that could change in a few years.

The day is fast approaching when the biggest problem in the Inland Empire won’t be creating jobs. As the region’s population continues to grow, and more businesses locate here, there will be enough jobs.

The problem will be finding enough qualified people to fill those jobs, according to a study released last month by ReadyNation/America’s Edge, a group of national business leaders based in Washington, D.C.

If current trends continue, half of the high-growth and high-wage jobs in Riverside and San Bernardino counties by 2020 will require an associate’s degree or higher, while jobs in the region requiring a bachelor’s degree are expected to grow 50 percent faster than jobs that only require a high school diploma, according to the study.

Also, during the next 10 years, 60 percent of the jobs in the Inland Empire with the highest projected vacancies will require education beyond high school, and one-quarter of those positions will require a degree, or some training, in the medical field.

All of this is ominous because close to 20 percent of the Inland region’s high school students don’t graduate on time, according to ReadyNation/America’s Edge.

“There’s no question this is a serious problem,” said John Husing, the Inland region’s leading economist. “The bottom line is that 47 percent of the adult population in the Inland Empire has a high school education or less. That’s a real lack of education, and fixing that is going to be a tremendous challenge.”

Community colleges used to put a major emphasis on programs designed to give adults jobs skills, but a lot of those two-year schools have moved away from that approach in recent years.

“There’s been a real rollback in the technological fields, especially in medicine,” Husing said. “It’s not clear who’s going to run the MRI machines, or who will work in post-op. Those jobs require some training and education, and we aren’t going to have enough qualified people in the Inland Empire to fill them.

Unfortunately, the problem is not confined to the Inland Empire. All of California is facing a similar situation.

By 2025, the state will have a deficit of one million workers needed to fill jobs that require a bachelor’s degree. There will be a similar shortage of qualified workers needed to fill middle-school jobs, meaning jobs that require a high school diploma but not a four-year degree, according to ReadyNation/America’s Edge.

Two thirds of the jobs created in California during the current decade will require more than a high school education, and 60 percent of the fastest-growing and high-wage jobs will require at least a two-year degree, according the study.

“A pipeline of skilled workers will be hard to create when 20 percent of California high school students fail to graduate on time,” the report stated.

To fix the problem, ReadyNation/America’s Edge has developed the Linked Learning Alliance, a four-year program that allows high school students to take courses that will put them on a specific career path, including engineering, biomedicine and health and arts and media.

The non-profit entity created Linked Learning for business leaders throughout United States who need a more educated workforce to compete not only against their U.S. competitors but also in the global economy, said Jennifer Ortega, director of ReadyNation/America’s Edge San Francisco office.

“We’re going to have to make a huge investment in the economy, and in our youth, in order to fix this problem,” said Ortega, whose office covers all of ReadNet/America’s Edge’s operations in California. “In the Inland Empire, it’s true that there are a lot of people who don’t have the education and the skill set to enter the workforce, but I don’t think it’s that different than the rest of the state.”

So far, five Inland school districts — Chino Valley Unified, Upland Unified, San Bernardino City Unified, Colton Joint Unified and Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified – have reportedly signed up for Linked Learning.

While not every student in those districts is participating in Linked Learning, the program’s numbers are expected to grow quickly. By 2017, all of the students in San Bernardino City Unified will be in Linked Learning or some other curriculum based on a specific career path, Ortega said.

“In a best-case scenario, all of our students would get a professional internship.” Ortega said.

Michael Gallo, president and chief executive officer of Kelly Space & Technology in San Bernardino, may be as familiar with the Inland Empire’s education gap as anyone.

It’s been a problem, Gallo said, since he co-founded the company in 1993, and it’s slowly gotten worse since then.

Gallo, who chairs the San Bernardino County Workforce Investment Board’s economic development committee, has come up with a program designed to solve the problem, the “Launch Initiative,” that he introduced last year.

Like Linked Learning, the Launch Initiative stresses education designed with a specific career in mind, but it also focuses on other factors, like housing and public health, that affect people’s lives and career pursuits.

“People have to have stable home lives,” Gallo said. “You really have to have that before you can get a career going.”