By Mark Carlisle
Mail | X: @mwcarlisle

Phoenix officials have been doing more in recent years to help residents find better jobs, but the city is likely not doing all it can and not investing nearly as much money into the effort as other major U.S. metro areas, an expert said.

“The city is probably leaving money on the table,” Gordon Innes, an economic development consultant with Bloomberg Associates told a Phoenix subcommittee this month.

Phoenix’s Business and Workforce Development Board is dwarfed in funding by many other major U.S. cities, Innes showed the Economic Development and Housing Subcommittee during its Dec. 11 meeting, and isn’t able to compete for grant funding many nonprofits give out for workforce development.

The workforce development board is also known as the local ARIZONA@WORK board.

Innes did not suggest the city increase funding for the board, which has seen its funding from the federal government decrease in recent years, but rather improve its fundraising efforts, creating a new position for a fundraising coordinator.

As it is, he said, Phoenix’s workforce development board does not have the scale to submit applications for grants like the $5.5 million Cognizant Foundation gave to U.S. cities last year, along with a host of other donors such as JPMorgan Chase or his own parent company’s Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“Having someone who can lead that work and who can really make it simple for the employers, for the foundations to channel the funding to Phoenix rather than elsewhere is a priority going forward,” Innes said.

Innes’ colleague Kristen Titus, a Bloomberg Associates workforce development consultant who also consults with the city, has experience both distributing funding and fundraising and will help to train whoever is selected for the new position, Innes said.

Phoenix Community and Economic Development Director Christine Mackay told the subcommittee she and her staff would be back early in 2025 to discuss creating the new position and fundraising efforts.

Innes compared Phoenix’s workforce board budget, which has gone from $14.2 million in 2023 to $11.1 million in 2024 to $10.2 million in 2025 for a city of 1.65 million people to Los Angeles with a budget of $46.9 million for 3.8 million residents and Philadelphia with $23.5 million for 1.5 million residents in fiscal year 2024. He also included one lesser-funded city, Austin, Texas, with a $6.9 million budget for 1.2 million residents.

The decline in funding has not hurt Phoenix’s labor market, which Innes said has been “significantly outperforming the U.S. as a whole” by many metrics, including job growth, unemployment rate and ratio of job opening to unemployed residents.

“Our funding in WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) has consistently decreased, but it has not stopped us from doing the impactful work that we’ve been able to do,” said Phoenix Business and Workforce Development Board Director LaSetta Hogans.

However, there are still a lot of positions unfilled. A survey in the fall showed Phoenix had about 162,000 vacant positions unfilled and about 45% of small-business owners said they had vacancies they’ve had trouble filling.

Innes and Hogans outlined how future workforce development goals for the city will involve training workers in skills employers have identified through surveys, particularly in the information technology and manufacturing industries, that their job applicants lack. This will include “upskilling” employed workers as well as training unemployed workers.

Survey results showed the “soft skills” that IT applicants lacked most are communications, operations and being detail-oriented, and the most lacked hard skills are selling techniques, computer science and ledging/billing.

The most lacking in manufacturing were communications, problem solving and being detail-oriented for soft skills and experience in export control, warehouse and auditing for hard skills.

Mackay highlighted some of the city’s existing workforce programs for the emerging industry of semiconductor manufacturing, including a training program in the county’s community college and the country’s first registered apprenticeship training program for the semiconductor technicians.

“I’m hopeful that we can continue to expand our job growth in our city, and I think we really are an emerging city when it comes to technology,” said Vice Mayor Debra Stark.

A particular workforce focus for the board heading into 2025 will be “getting ahead of artificial intelligence,” Mackay said, to train and redeploy workers in jobs being affected by AI being used.

We’d like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Mark Carlisle can be reached at mcarlisle@iniusa.org.

Mark Carlisle
Associate Editor | Phoenix

mcarlisle@iniusa.org

Meet Mark

Mark Carlisle joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2017, covering Glendale. He has since moved to the Daily Independent team, primarily covering the city of Phoenix along with other topics affecting the Valley at-large.

Community: Mark enjoys taking his young son to BabyTime at the Phoenix Public Library, to the OdySea Aquarium and to various sporting events around the Valley.

Education: Chapman University with a BA in English Journalism and one in Screenwriting.

Random Fact: Mark worked at a tuxedo shop in college. Just don’t ask him to tie a bowtie.

 

Hobbies: Spending time with his wife, son and dog, watching sports and TV shows, listening to audiobooks and occasionally writing fiction or designing a board game.