There are 43 organizations providing workforce training in the city and surrounding communities. Watch video
SPRINGFIELD -- Baystate Health has 12,000 employees and makes about 1,400 new hires a year of folks from outside its system, said President and CEO Mark Keroack.
And as the city's largest employer, Baystate's gotten used to creating its own pipelines, or dedicated training programs to fill its need for workers, Keroack said.
That's changing with Springfield Works and SkillSmart, an online portal for job seekers that tells them what skills they need for the job they want. It also helps them identify the skills they have already -- either from school, the military or just from living their lives -- and helps them find places that offer the training they need.
Baystate is one of 20 local employers that have posted a total of 100 jobs in the new SkillSmart portal, accessible at springfieldworks.skillsmart.us. It's a project of Springfield Works and the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts. Springfield Works and the EDC rolled it out Wednesday with an event at the UMass Center at Springfield in Tower Square after 18 months of tinkering.
MGM Springfield already uses SkillSmart to evaluate job seekers for the roughly 3,00 jobs it pledged to create when its $960 million resort casino opens 11 months from now in September 2018.
Roughly 58 percent of Springfield's working-age population is working or looking for a job. Springfield Works' goal is to get that number up to 75 percent.
At the same time, there are 43 organizations providing workforce training in the city and the surrounding communities, which leads to confusion and duplication of effort, according to Springfield Works Director Anne Shecrallah Kandilis.
All this is going on while good jobs go unfilled and employers like Baystate, MGM and others struggle to hire, Kandilis said.
"Where is the disconnect between job seeker and employer?" she said. "One of our major hopes is to connect the community technologically."
Patrick Streck, senior director of IT at Baystate, said the SkillSmart portal also helps by directing applicants to jobs that they are qualified to take.
"We get people who apply for any jobs that they are not qualified for because they just want a foot in the door," he said.
Kandilis said SkillSmart also helps people make use of skills that don't often show up on a traditional resume. For instance, it prompts people to input skills they learned in the military or volunteering in their communities.
"Maybe you were a PTA mom," she said. "Then you learned some bookkeeping. You learned customer service. You learned job skills."
While the grant was to Springfield, the SkillSmart system is open to people in all of Western Massachusetts.
Funding for Springfield Works comes mostly from a three-year, $475,000 grant Springfield won in the competitive Working Cities Challenge program run by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Prabal Chakrabarti, senior vice president of community affairs at the Boston Fed and an originator of the Working Cities Challenge program, said small cities like Springfield can only move forward if the public sector, the private sector and nonprofits work together.
He pointed out the logos of cooperating entities in Springfield Works, a list that includes the EDC, Baystate, United Personnel, FutureWorks, Tech Foundry, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, Pioneer Valley Planning Commission and others.
"The biggest thing is the way everyone is working together," he said. "That might stand as the biggest accomplishment."
As big, he said, as major projects like MGM, the CRRC rail car factory and the recently restored Union Station. That's because the economy here is still lagging.
"Springfield is not where we need it to be," Chakrabarti said. "Most small cities are not where we need them to be."