Looking to keep the Hudson Valley”™s largest economic engine running smoothly, Westchester County Association officials this winter are launching an off-campus workforce training initiative with academic and health care partners and bidding to manage a nearly $10 million federal grant to train the region”™s workers for jobs in the fast-changing health care sector.
WCA officials at a press conference on Jan. 13 announced the start of the Hudson Valley Workforce Academy, a program of short-term certificate courses designed, with input from employers, to teach skills needed in the region”™s health care, technology and business sectors. The training will focus on developing specific skills needed by employers and will also address broader workplace skills in management, critical thinking, empathy training, organization and communication, WCA officials said.
Amy Allen, WCA vice president, will serve as the academy”™s executive director.
The courses, to be held at WCA headquarters in White Plains, typically will last six weeks. They will be designed to upgrade the skills of companies”™ current employees and will also be offered to unemployed and underemployed residents. Courses will be taught by experts in industry and academia, WCA officials said.
The business advocacy organization will open its academy with a five-week, $595 course in health care analytics that starts Feb. 24. It is designed for health care managers with little or no experience in data analytics.
WCA officials said they are working with Mercy College”™s Strategic Consulting Institute to interview WCA”™s member employers to identify additional needs in health care and other fields.
WCA Chairman William P. Harrington at the press conference said some 2,000 to 2,500 jobs need to be filled in health care and technology in the Hudson Valley, but the region lacks enough qualified candidates to fill them. “The health care sector is the Hudson Valley”™s largest economic engine, contributing more than $15 billion to the regional economy,” he said. “It is critical to develop a qualified health care workforce to keep that engine from stalling.”
The academy “will help better position workers to fill the vacant positions, create jobs, and help our regional economy grow,” said Harrington, a partner and trial attorney at Bleakley Platt & Schmidt LLP in White Plains.
The WCA has enlisted members of its 2-year-old Hudson Valley Healthcare Consortium to work together and with corporations and 16 participating colleges and universities to address the demand for skilled health care workers and help spur job growth in the region. A total of 15 health care providers in a five-county region and the Suburban Hospital Alliance, which includes 50 hospitals in the Hudson Valley and Long Island, have signed a memorandum of understanding at the launch of the workforce initiative.
At the 30,000-employee Montefiore Medical Center, employees will need to be retrained as the institution converts in-hospital resources to ambulatory care, the new national model for delivering high-quality, cost-efficient care to residents in their communities, said Jeffrey Menkes, senior vice president for system network development at Montefiore. He said a new generation of workers will need to be trained in big data analytics, a driving force behind new health care delivery and payment models and innovations in health care and biotechnology.
Menkes said Montefiore has 1,500 employees in Yonkers engaged in big data mining. He said Montefiore also will need workers at its newly opened customer call center in Tarrytown, which will be “a huge area” for employment openings.
Robert Glazer, CEO of ENT & Allergy Associates in Tarrytown, in a statement at the Hudson Valley Workforce Academy launch said health care providers “have needed something like the academy to help employers update their employees”™ knowledge and skills in a field that”™s rapidly changing. We don”™t have enough expertise to train them ourselves, but we want to have input on what type of training they need. The WCA has created a unique opportunity for us to do that.”
“The Westchester County Association”™s role is a facilitator in this,” Harrington said.
The WCA hopes to strengthen that role with its appointment as manager of Hudson Valley Healthcare Connection, a job training initiative the Westchester-Putnam Workforce Investment Board will launch in the first quarter of 2015. The four-year workforce training program will be funded by a federal Ready to Work Partnership grant of $9.8 million awarded to the seven-county Hudson Valley region. Its goal is to intensively train and place 425 long-term unemployed residents of the region in health care jobs and additionally train 75 current health care workers to improve their skills.
Harrington said the WCA will bid for the job of project manager when the Workforce Investment Board shortly issues a request for proposals
“Our scope is not Westchester-centric,” Harrington said of the WCA”™s workforce initiative. “We view this as a regional solution and a regional opportunity.”
The WCA”™s academy launch followed an announcement in late December of another new initiative in 2015 to more closely align the region”™s educational institutions with the workforce needs of the health care sector.
Based in Orange County, the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corp. will launch HV Eds & Meds, a marketing effort to make the Hudson Valley what HVEDC President and CEO Laurence P. Gottlieb called “a major epicenter for higher education and health care institutions” and forge stronger strategic alliances between health care organizations and public and private colleges and universities in the seven-county region.
