Hotel executive Kevin Porter remembers a time when an online job posting would generate hundreds of candidates

These days he’s lucky to get five qualified applicants. Toronto may have an 8 per cent unemployment rate, but the skilled workers Porter needs are being snapped up by building developers.

That conundrum is exactly what a new approach to job creation is trying to address in the city. It’s called sector-based workforce development: in plain English, that means forming partnerships between community agencies, labour groups and industries to identify job shortages and to train underemployed workers to fill them.

It might sound intuitive, but it’s a marked departure from traditional employment strategies that focus on getting individual workers into jobs fast, rather than building careers tailored to the needs of a particular industry. In Toronto, the strategy is being championed by the Hospitality Worker’s Training Centre, whose skills-building programs are successfully funneling disadvantaged workers into a needy sector.

Porter, the general manager of Don Valley Hotel and Suites, is one beneficiary. His industry anticipates a 45 per cent increase in demand for workers in the hospitality industry over the next 10 years in Toronto, and filling labour gaps is getting harder.

“Its tough to source employees these days,” he says. “It is tough to go through the training process. It is tough to determine whether that process is going to work or not. The Hospitality Training Centre has stepped in.”

The program began its life as a program to help hospitality workers during the 2003 SARS crisis, when Toronto hotel reservations plummeted by 70 per cent. One-third of employees were laid off. The sector’s union, UNITE HERE local 75, established computer and English-language training classes to help get workers back on their feet, and eventually negotiated a comprehensive training fund into its collective agreement with the hotel sector.

Now, the industry’s employers contribute cents for every hour each employee works to the fund. That money, in turn, supports the Hospitality Workers Training Centre, an independent non-profit that focuses on getting marginalized workers into good jobs.

“We’ve trained deaf room attendants who are now working at some of our hotels, people with learning disabilities, an individual who had a stroke in his mid-30s who hadn’t worked in seven years and is now working full time in one of the hotels, ” says Danielle Olsen, the organization’s executive director.

The centre’s symbiotic relationship with the hospitality industry lets employers take the lead in designing three-week intensive training programs to maximize effectiveness. The result, so far, is impressive: around 300 new and existing workers are benefitting a year, and the centre boasts an 80 per cent job placement rate for new entrants into the hospitality industry. The initiative has garnered 50 per cent savings on recruitment and training for employers, and has a retention rate at one year of 70 per cent, reducing turnover costs.

“The level (workers are) coming out with, I’m very, very pleased with,” says Porter.

The idea of partnering with industry to stimulate employment is increasingly common south of the border — but still surprisingly underutilized in Ontario, advocates say. In the U.S., there are over 1,000 so-called sector partnerships across a variety of industries from biotechnology to food manufacturing in 25 states. An evaluation of the success of the strategy in Massachusetts, for example, showed that 41 per cent of participating employers reported lower employee turnover and almost a quarter reported a decrease in customer complaints. 100 per cent of businesses said the partnerships were valuable to their company.

Meanwhile, according to a report by the Washington D.C.-based Aspen Institute, 48 per cent of workers in sector-based programs were able to lift themselves out of poverty based on their earnings alone. Workers who got jobs through sector partnerships reported 18 per cent higher wages than workers who did not, because they were more likely to steady work in higher-paid positions and receive benefits, such as health insurance.

Shirley Viscount has completed two of the Hospitality Workers Training Centre’s programs. After spending 20 years in precarious, erratically scheduled work as a personal support worker, she is now hired as a houseperson at Porter’s Don Valley Hotel and Suites.

“I did this course and I landed a full-time job,” she says. “And it’s just been amazing and its really nice place to work. We’re all like family.”

Adriana Beemans, director of the Inclusive Local Economies program at the Metcalf Foundation, says the approach allows workers to build long-term opportunities in a growing industry, rather than shunting into the nearest available job opening.

“You’re not just focused on a job, you’re focused on a career.”

But so far the province has been slow to catch on the approach despite examples of success both locally and south of the border. Ontario invests more than $1 billion annually in employment, training and labour market programs, but advocates say little of that is devoted to sector-specific strategies.

“I would say that we have a fairly supply-side approach. So we really focus on the individual, which is important, but not necessarily a strong understanding of what the needs are of the industry,” Beemans says.

“We only recently in the last 18 to 24 months … had policies that are really focused on employer involvement,” adds Olsen.

For Kevin Porter, building on that momentum makes plain business sense.

“I really think that everyone should number one, sit up and pay attention because (the Hospitality Workers Training Centre) is doing some great things.”

Source: http://www.thestar.com/business/2015/03/27/program-doesnt-just-provide-jobs-it-builds-careers.html