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Strategy 18: Business Assistance for Expansion and Job Creation

Strategy Description:

Targeting and attracting new businesses is really secondary in importance to retaining and growing businesses that are already in the area. The strategy comprises various actions to focus communications with the regional business community in ways that help them expand and create new jobs.

Key Components:

The region may wish to create a strategy for communicating with all the important businesses on a regular basis, particularly with those in targeted sectors. This could also mean establishing strong connections between business assistance and targeting to specific industries or to higher-paying high tech jobs in general. There are various business assistance programs available in the region, from the county, the CBICC, BIACC, and other sources, including regional, University, State, and federal resources. The programs seem to be generally typical of the kinds of programs and assistance that most large county economic development organizations make available to new and existing businesses. There is a need for access to summary information on business assistance and training programs so all readers can easily scan the menu of services and focus on the need and range of potential actions. In order to increase the capacity of small companies to bid on large orders, and expand their hiring opportunities, the region should encourage small companies in similar industries to partner with each other to bid on jobs that are normally outside the scope of their abilities. Networks are particularly effective when they also develop marketing and business development programs to support the companies within the network.

The regional role might be to:

 Labor skills and training opportunities should be at the center of the marketing program. The region should develop a consortium of companies to identify common skills sets required for their labor force. The companies within the consortium or alliance, rather than the educational establishment, develop the training curriculum to teach these skill sets, pay a fee for the course development, and take the lead in delivering the curriculum. As companies are hiring they will have access to a pool of labor already trained on the defined skills.

The role of the educational system changes from one of delivering training, to coordinating the program components including: assessment of current work force skills, enrollment and tracking of participants, participation in back up training if needed, and logistical arrangements. The advantage to business is that it creates a training system immediately responsive to their needs, lowers their per capita cost of training, and lessens the time spent on the job providing training. The advantage for local training organizations and institutions is that it creates important partnerships with the business community that effectively serve the training needs without the expense of staff, space, and curriculum development.

The regional role in developing this training alliance is to:

 Such an alliance would send the message to new and existing companies that the region has a special approach to ensuring that businesses have access to a trained workforce. Regional Application:

The Mid–Bald Eagle Watershed is not clearly aligned with current economic development entities and boundaries. Not all issues will be met by either membership driven or non-regional providers. While most business assistance is project specific, it may be helpful to provide certain types of assistance across the watershed in the future.

Implementation:

The implementation is a multi-organizational effort. At the current time, the Chambers of Commerce play the leading role for these services. It is not readily apparent who should serve the role of the convenor for the regional effort nor when this regional effort will be most beneficial. It will also be necessary to determine the role of municipalities in implementation of this strategy. The best business assistance programs will require close coordination with the Work Force Investment Board of Central Pennsylvania (this entity includes Centre County) and educational institutions.

Indicators:

Funding: (unclear at this time)