Darryl & Co. with Rosalin Acosta

My pleasure, Daryl. This is wonderful, it's like old home week being back with my banking friends.

So yes. Our unemployment rate is hovering around 3.9 right now. Those are December numbers; they will get updated within a couple of weeks with a revision for the entire year. We do see glimmers of hope. If we all have that painful recollection of February 2020, we lost over 700,000 jobs in the pandemic, and since then we've recovered about 77% of the jobs we lost. But the recovery has been uneven, and that is something our office is very cognizant of. When we put our workforce training programs together, we have to be very intentional, very laser-focused on places that have not recovered as well. For example, Lawrence has the highest unemployment rate not just in Massachusetts but in all of New England. So we need to focus on our gateway cities, and our gateway cities are made up of the most Black and Latino citizens. As we think about the policies we're going to put in place, we're very focused on that. When we look at women, we see that women have dropped out of the labor force in record numbers. That's another consideration we have to give: what are the factors that caused that drop? Frankly, some of it we're trying to figure out ourselves; we don't have all the answers. But I do see that we are recovering. It's a slow recovery. We actually saw job gains during even the Omicron surge, which was positive. I think employers are getting back, and they did not stop their hiring during that surge.

I think it's different by age group. We see people that have decided to retire early. We see people that are completely burned out and need to sideline and maybe come back at some point. We see folks switching jobs, and there have been a lot of stories about what people are calling the Great Resignation. We tend to call it more the 'right mismatch' because we see a real large mismatch and a return in the labor market. Just because they resign doesn't mean they become unemployed, right? They could just be leaving your organization and going to another because all of a sudden they're getting higher pay. There's a lot of competition right now for qualified employees, so we're seeing a lot of movement in the labor force. But one of the things we're highly focused on is the mismatch. There are over 250,000 jobs open in Massachusetts, and about 35% of those jobs are in the professional management sector, more middle-skilled jobs. When I look at folks that are unemployed, a lot of them are in the low-skilled labor pool. So again, you have a mismatch, and that's exactly the work in front of us right now: how do you make those bridges work so you can bring some people and upskill some of those folks from low-wage skills to middle skills?

We have millions of things we're doing, literally. The first thing I would recommend for all employers is to get in touch with your local MassHire Career Center. The local MassHire Career Centers are a great resource for employers as well as job seekers. I come from private industry; I've been in banking for over 30 years and joined the Baker-Polito administration five years ago. I was astonished at the amount of resources available in workforce. I had no idea we had 29 career centers throughout Massachusetts. That's where all the information is, that's where your resources are. So find your local MassHire, call them, work with them. They know who's looking for work and they're trying to match job seekers with employers. Another place is our Commonwealth Corporation, that's our quasi, and all our workforce training programs are executed through Commonwealth Corporation. I would suggest you look at the Commonwealth Corporation website for resources, but MassHire can help you with that too. In December of this past year, the legislature and the governor signed a $4 billion ARPA bill. $240 million of that is specifically for workforce training. For the first time in my secretariat, I can say money is not the problem. There is plenty of money. What we need, believe it or not, is we need you, we need employers, we need help coordinating the people that are out looking for work and the employers with those job openings. That's the goal right now. The governor commissioned a report back in the fall, the Future of Work report. I'm happy to share that so you can share it with your audience. The Future of Work report said that we as a commonwealth, in order to remain economically viable, need to train 300,000 to 400,000 people over the next 10 years. That's a heavy lift. That means at least 30,000 to 40,000 people need to be reskilled and upskilled. We are the number one center for life sciences in the country and arguably in the world. In order to stay that way, we need to make sure we're training people into the biomanufacturing space. We need to make sure we're training people for cybersecurity jobs. We know how important that is across industry, in banking, in healthcare, any industry needs cybersecurity. We launched just last fall, in partnership with the Massachusetts Bankers Association, the first credit analyst apprenticeship program in the country. So I would encourage you to get a hold of the Massachusetts Bankers Association or our office if you're in banking and you want to... I know credit analysts are hard to find, so with my banking background I wanted to make sure we had an apprenticeship program there. Part of that $240 million is dedicated to expanding apprenticeship programs. Most people think of apprenticeship programs as just in construction and the trades, but we've been working over the past few years to expand that into high-demand industries like manufacturing, technology, life sciences, and finance. So those are some of the resources, but again, you don't have to remember all that. It's overwhelming. MassHire is your answer to finding those resources.

Daryl, I don't think it's a choice. I think it's almost a requirement. One of the things we did see in the report that is completely playing out right now is people want the flexibility. There's a saying that it takes two weeks to form a habit. We've been doing this for two years.

Daryl, thank you so much. It was my pleasure, and I look forward to being invited again. Have a great day.