Transit customers, many heading home from work, board a bus at Eighth Street South and Marquette Avenue South in downtown Minneapolis. The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce is creating a new Center for Workforce Solutions to consolidate existing workforce-development programs. (File photo: Bill Klotz)

Chamber combines workforce programs in new entity

By: William Morris May 8, 2018 3:42 pm

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce is consolidating its workforce-development programs under one name as it braces for years of tight labor markets.The business group, which has about 2,300 member companies around the state, has created the Center for Workforce Solutions to confront Minnesota’s worsening workforce shortages, according to a Monday press release. Bill Blazar, the chamber’s senior vice president of public affairs and business development, will manage the center.

“The convergence of what we’re hearing from our members and what we hear from [site visits], told us we not only needed an effort in the private sector to address the immediate workforce problems that businesses are facing, but we also needed an effort that was sustainable over several years, because the rate of growth in Minnesota’s workforce is not projected to turn upward for at least a decade,” Blazar said in an interview.

The center will bring together four existing chamber programs: RealTime Talent, which provides real-time labor market data; MN Job Match, a job-to-candidate matching platform; Business Education Networks, which works with workforce training programs; and a series of educational opportunities hosted for community and business leaders.

Blazar said rolling the programs into one entity will enable the chamber to better support other workforce initiatives around the state, and also will build a more robust infrastructure for any future programs the chamber wishes to add.

The state worker shortage is expected to hit 239,000 by 2022, and Blazar said that threatens to undermine Minnesota’s entire economy because a quality workforce can offset Minnesota’s relatively high taxes and other challenges for businesses.

“That puts a little more urgency behind the need to solve our workforce problem,” he said. “If that workforce is not available and up to the task, then a lot of other things don’t and won’t work.”

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