ASHLAND — An understanding of history and current analytics is crucial to making the right choices for the future, Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel told a room full of area business leaders Thursday afternoon.
Tressel spent Thursday touring the Ashland County-West Holmes Career Center’s expansion and speaking at a roundtable with business leaders. The tour is the latest on a list of stops for Tressel as he works to craft the state’s Workforce Playbook.
A press release from the event stated the playbook “will establish a plan to retain existing talent, recruit new talent to Ohio, and rally Ohio’s existing workforce to greater productivity.”
“… The investment we’ve had in career tech and in workforce development and in all of the training programs in the last six years under the DeWine administration has been significant,” Tressel said.
He hopes to build on that through investments in education, adding the governor tasked him with these efforts because of Tressel’s belief in their effectiveness. But knowing about history and being able to use current data to predict what’s coming is key to making the right investments.
He added one thing he’s noticed is the areas with the best outcomes are those where business leaders, educators, politicians and more are in the room together.
That served as one of Source Media Properties’ main takeaways from a six-month reporting project on workforce development last year.
By having all those people present Thursday, Tressel said Ashland County seems to be doing something right in the workforce development arena.
For their part, business leaders told Tressel they could benefit from more state funding.
Tressel told them it helps to present their representatives with measurable data about the impact of their programs.
Below are photos from Tressel’s tour of the Career Center.
