Vocational education shortfall stifles US mobility

If Torres Hughes had grown up in his part of the west side of Chicago in the 1960s or 1970s, manufacturing would have been a natural career choice.

But now his neighbourhood is crippled by crime and unemployment, and the 21-year-old factory worker says most local people have long given up on the sector - even though opportunities are still out there.

"Companies are hiring but nobody is skilled enough to work," says Mr Hughes, who works on the factory floor at Chicago-based Freedman Seating, a company that makes seats for buses and trains. "You can't just walk in and ask them to train you."

Mr Torres made it to Freedman thanks in part to the education he received at a local school, Austin Polytechnical Academy, which offers students training in manufacturing skills such as computer-controlled cutting and design, in partnership with local employers.

His case is rare. The US private sector is in the midst of its longest uninterrupted hiring spree on record, opening up positions in a range of so-called "middle-skilled jobs" - from manufacturing to medical care and parts of IT - that could offer routes out of poverty.

Yet in poor neighbourhoods, such as the Austin area of Chicago, large swaths of the population are ill-equipped to take advantage of the openings - if they even know they exist. Many leave local schools without even the "basic competencies" needed for a career, says Erica Swinney, who heads the academy's manufacturing programme.

Harry Holzer, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution think-tank, says the US suffers from a stratified education system which fails to equip poorer children with basic skills, combined with a longstanding underinvestment in vocational qualifications.

While US employers look to universities to churn out fully trained employees - often at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars of student debt - the country has neglected alternative paths which are more developed in Europe. In parts of the US such as the southeast it has taken the arrival of big German manufacturers to give local vocational education a kick-start.

"If we care about social mobility in America we can't just dismiss this," says Mr Holzer, who released a report on the topic for Brookings this month. "It requires America to be more serious about career and technical education than it has been in a long time."

Economic debate has been dominated by discussion of the "hollowing out" of the middle of the workforce because of new digital technologies and globalisation. This narrative, which is leaving its mark on the UK general election as well as US politics, suggests that opportunities will be concentrated in very highly skilled jobs and the lower end of the wage spectrum such as food service, where recent hiring has been rapid.

But in the US experts say this understates the significance of middle-skilled jobs which require some postsecondary training but not necessarily a university degree.

Openings are emerging even in cities that are barely scraping their way out of the economic downturn. Research to be published this week by JPMorgan Chase estimates that there were 321,700 middle-skill positions in the Detroit region in 2013, paying an average hourly wage of $23.37, well above the region's living wage of $17.08.

Some 9,800 middle-skill job openings are projected every year until 2018, the research finds. Alongside healthcare and manufacturing, the leading sectors with middle-skill needs in the area will be finance, IT and marketing.

"These are jobs that many employers are having trouble filling, in part because we don't have the training pipeline - we haven't created the training infrastructure," says Chauncy Lennon, head of workforce initiatives at JPMorgan.

A coming wave of retirements as baby boomers step aside will throw open more vacancies, with about a fifth of all manufacturing and healthcare employees now aged 55 or older.

While US manufacturing employment will probably remain a shadow of the scale it attained in its 1960s and 1970s heyday, nearly 900,000 jobs were created nationwide between its trough in February 2010 and February this year - the longest uninterrupted spell of yearly job growth in 40 years, says Sreenivas Ramaswamy of consultants McKinsey.

The number of people in manufacturing occupations in Chicago rose 5.8 per cent between 2010 and 2014, according to figures compiled by World Business Chicago, a public-private partnership that aims to promote regional economic expansion. Growth in healthcare and computer or mathematics related occupations has been stronger, at 5.9 per cent and 9.3 per cent respectively.

Many of those roles require more specialised skills than the traditional assembly-line positions that have been wiped out by technology and globalisation. In Austin, Marisela Williams, the head of human resources at Freedman, says attracting precision welders and machine operators is the "bane of my existence" - even though the firm is based in a part of Chicago where unemployment is rife.

The Obama administration has launched vocational initiatives, including Youth CareerConnect, which focuses on high schools, and a so-called TechHire scheme helping adults get into jobs such as software and cyber security. In his January State of the Union address the president also proposed that community colleges offer two years of free education.

Yet dropout rates at community colleges are extremely high, partnerships with employers take years to develop and too many poor children arrive at courses with substandard literacy and maths skills. Chicago's city colleges have doubled graduation rates since a major overhaul launched at the start of the decade but they still stand at only 14 per cent.

In Chicago a boom is under way in the thriving downtown area but community leaders in poor neighbourhoods in the city's south and west say job opportunities opening up there too often seem worlds away.

There are "two Chicagos," says Darnell Shields, director of operations at Austin Coming Together, a local development network - echoing a theme of the city's mayoral election. While there has been advancement in some parts of the city, Austin "really hasn't moved and progressed."

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