Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

GUEST COLUMN:

Sisolak: Building a durable economy, one worker at a time

Steve Marcus

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak waves during a visit to the Horizon Ridge Wellness Clinic on East Flamingo Road Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021.

Nevada has weathered boom-and-bust cycles in our economy since before we became a state in 1864 — the entrepreneurial spirit of Nevadans is rivaled only by volatility in our signature industries such as mining, hospitality and tourism.

Still, a global pandemic that emptied our tourism and entertainment centers virtually overnight — leaving more than a quarter of Nevada’s workers unemployed — went far beyond what we’ve seen in the Silver State.

Nevada’s recovery since — we’ve regained more than 250,000 jobs from the lowest point last year — is the result of positive national and global trends as well as policies my administration championed since long before the coronavirus emerged. In a sign of Nevada’s robust hiring pipeline, more than 250 of the 2,100 job seekers who attended my administration’s JobFest in December in Las Vegas were hired on the spot, with many employers expected to hire hundreds more qualified applicants in the coming weeks.

When I took office in 2019, I prioritized diversifying Nevada’s economy beyond our traditional industries. I worked to unlock the potential of our state’s community colleges to expand access to programs that can lead to immediate, good-paying jobs for Nevadans. My administration built on initiatives by my predecessors to invest in industry partnerships to ensure that new and existing businesses in Nevada will be able to recruit and retain qualified employees in targeted industry sectors, including information technology, mining, advanced manufacturing and health care.

Our investments focused as early as K-12, where students can connect with employers early on to prepare for the future of work and see what career possibilities exist here in Nevada.

Currently there are four industries with higher employment than pre-pandemic. Transportation and warehousing employment is up 17%, professional and businesses services employment is up 6%, and 2% more Nevadans are employed in both food services and manufacturing.

These efforts helped Nevada become the fastest-growing economy in the country before the pandemic, where unemployment sat below 4%. The arrival of COVID-19, however, reminded us in Nevada and other states of the vulnerability of many of our fellow Americans and the need to redouble our commitment to efforts to equip all workers with the tools to succeed in a rapidly changing economy.

One of the ways we did this is by joining nine other states in the first phase of the Workforce Innovation Network (WIN) — a nonpartisan learning and action collaborative launched last year by the bipartisan National Governors Association (NGA) and with founding supporter the Cognizant Foundation. Nevada has worked alongside Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington to incubate ideas, share knowledge, and scale innovations to better connect job seekers to work, education, training and the essential supports to help workers succeed.

Working with NGA WIN, the governor’s office aims to expand and diversify the state’s pool of employers in industries that offer quality career pathways along with training and career services that people need to enter those industries.

Along with the multistate NGA WIN, Nevada’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) has its own WINN — Workforce Innovations for a New Nevada — fund, which supports companies looking to expand or locate business operations in Nevada through employer-informed training programs that equip workers with needed skills.

With a $2 million WINN grant, the College of Southern Nevada launched an advanced manufacturing rapid response program at its Henderson campus late last year, allowing for at least 200 Nevadans annually to access training that was not previously available and for employers to tap into a skilled talent pipeline.

We are revitalizing the state’s Industry Sector Councils to help industry and state government align on workforce programs and strategies for the future of manufacturing, logistics, technology and health care. GOWINN and the Nevada Department of Education have also partnered on a teacher externship program to link Nevada high school teachers with employers in the state’s high-growth, high-demand industries.

We expect these initiatives and others to pay dividends over the coming years and decades — not only for Nevada’s economy, but more importantly for the workers and job seekers who comprise it. The pandemic has not only upended lives and livelihoods in Nevada and around the world, but also reminded us of the importance of our efforts to make our economy more diverse and inclusive. While boom-and-bust cycles are part of our past, they don’t need to be our future.

Steve Sisolak is the 30th governor of Nevada.