Name: Adopt A Class: Navigating the Workforce Landscape
Uploaded: 2026-04-22T17:16:40.579Z
Duration: 19 min 16 s
Description: Adopt A Class: Navigating the Workforce Landscape

Transcript for "Adopt A Class: Navigating the Workforce Landscape": Hello, everyone, and welcome to navigating the workforce landscape. Thank you so much for joining us today. So before we jump in, I do wanna give you a quick rundown of the webinar tools on your screen. And hello. My name is Kayla, and I'll be your host. If you have any questions, do not be shy. Go ahead and put those into the q and a on the right side of your screen. We'll be actively monitoring the q and a, and we'll do our best to address as many as possible towards the end of the session. If you wanna connect with fellow attendees, head on over to that chat tab on the right side, and would love to see, where you are tuning in from today. If you're looking for extra resources, you can check out the docs. You will find, downloadable presentation slides just in case you'd like to follow along. And lastly, if you'd like closed captioning on your screen, please click on the CC on the bottom right of your video stream box, and you can change the language there as well. Alright. So let's go ahead and get started. And I would like to introduce our speaker, and we have Sonia Fultz, who is the CEO of Adaptaclass. Well, good morning, everyone. It is always a privilege to come and join you on our webinar series that's sponsored by Paycor. So thank you so much to Paycor for this sponsorship that allows us to offer this service to all of our mentors and our our other partners. And, usually, if you've joined us before, you know that we often focus on things specific to mentorship. But this spring webinar, we decided to really be able to bring services to you. We would reach out to some of our partners that we work with all the time to ensure that you know opportunities that you have to serve your business better with this session that's really business one zero one, and we're partnering with the workforce council of Southwest Ohio and OhioMeansJobs to bring you this webinar. I was privileged to be asked to be on the business engagement committee of the workforce council of Southwest Ohio. And through that relationship, I've been able to connect with our speakers that will share more today about the services that OhioMeansJobs and the workforce council of Southwest Ohio offers to all of you and and all of us and how that partnership can grow for you and service as, a way for you to get support as you grow your businesses or other business needs you might have no matter what size your business. So I just wanna say on behalf of Adopt a Class how thankful we are to the workforce council of Southwest Ohio, to OhioMeansJobs for coming and spending time with us today. I'd be remiss if I didn't also say that Adopt A Class is coming up on the end of the academic year. It's always a very busy time for us. We were just able to share with 70 finalists that they will be honored at our breakfast on May 20. If you haven't attended our celebration of breakfast, it is one to attend. So if you would like to, to join us, you just go to our website at aacmentors.org, click on the events tab, and click on celebration breakfast, and you'll have more details there. But the room usually has over 600 people. This year, it is at 1st Financial Convention Center downtown. We're thrilled to be one of their first major big events since the reopening, and we'd love to have you join us. We have other things on the events tab. We have our golf outing, but we also have our heroes day and skilled trades day coming up. Both of those days will host more than twelve hundred seventh graders who will explore skilled trades pathways with our partners as well as heroes day highlights our military pathways and our first responder pathway. So a lot going on at Adopt A Class as always, but May is just really packed with so many great opportunities to come out and see our students in action learning about career pathways so that they too can one day be someone who who utilizes the services of Ohio Means Jobs and workforce council, whether building their own business or, representing their business. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to our three speakers. Our three speakers are Elaine Fay, Chuck Walters, and Vernia Mayberry. And then I'm going to let them do their own introductions so that you can put a face to a name and enjoy this next, forty five minutes together. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand it over, and I look forward to hearing as well what we're going to learn today. Oh, I can, start. I'm Elaine Fay. I am the business and community relations manager at the Work Force Council of Southwest Ohio. And then Chuck and Bernia, if you wanna introduce yourselves. I am Chuck Walters. I am the business service manager here at OhioMeansJobs. Hello? And my name is Vernia Mayberry. I am a business service rep at OhioMeansJobs. Thanks, Chuck and Bernia. So I'm gonna kick off, the presentation, telling you a little bit about the resources and partnerships available to help employers and job seekers succeed in Southwest Ohio. So, so I'm gonna kick this off, and then, Chuck and Virgil will get more into the specific services and resources offered through the workforce council and the Cincinnati and Hamilton County OhioMeansJob Center. So the workforce council of Southwest Ohio, we're, the local workforce board for Cincinnati and Hamilton County. We are the recipients of federal workforce funds through the workforce innovation and opportunity act or also called WIOA. We maximize those dollars by coordinating our efforts with businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit partners. We focus on the five in demand industries, which are advanced manufacturing, construction, health care, IT, and, supply chains and logistics. In Ohio, local workforce development boards and OhioMeansJob Centers provide both support for job seekers and employers by connecting employers to local talent and help job seekers build the skills needed, for end demand jobs. All of these services are coordinated through a high means job centers which serve as the front door for job seekers and employers. And then in the Greater Cincinnati region, there are four boards working together, since we're so close there to the border of, Kentucky and Indiana. So there's the, BCW workforce, the Northern Kentucky, Southeast Indiana, and then us as the workforce council of Southwest Ohio. And so, OhioMeansJob Centers sorry. I lost my place, OhioMeans job centers are free and open to everyone with no eligibility requirements to walk in the door, in Ohio there's an OhioMeans job center in every county The OhioMeans job centers can be kind of thought of as a one stop shop where under one roof you'll find multiple partners, organizations offering wraparound services, supports from resume help to training referrals to supportive services. And then for employers specifically, we help with finding, developing, and landing talent, and so this is a full pipeline approach. We interact directly with tens and thousands of job seekers every year, which means we have a deep bench of candidates ready to connect with you. And then now I am going to turn it over to Chuck and Bernia to talk a little bit more about some of the specific services and resources that are available, through the OhioMeans job center. Okay. Thank you, Elaine. Again, my name is Vernia. I am a business service rep with OhioMeansJobs. We assist with posting job openings. You can utilize that service by, logging on to our website, ohio meansjobs.com. We customize recruitment. We provide computer training labs, interview space, conference rooms. We help develop, job application and want and want ads. Excuse me. We also host open we host monthly job fairs, career fairs once a month here at our location as well. And that registration will be always on our website. So if you wanna come to a job fair, you wanna attend one, you can always sign up online just by looking at our website and book a spot. K. That's okay. Okay. We also and I know Elaine touched on the workforce innovation opportunity act. So we provide training for upskilling. We also help with clients, gaining knowledge about certifications. So trade schools, things of that nature. We also facilitate access to a diverse population. So we work with adults from ages 16 to 24, mature workers, senior workers. We host job fairs specifically for seniors. We also work with rapid response. So if someone is dislocated due to their company closing, we help with that. We also assist veterans, people of color, people with disabilities, and people in recovery. We offer training services. We perform skill assessments. We establish pre apprenticeships, apprenticeships, and internship programs. And, again, I touched on WIOA, which provides training and certifications. Usually, those certifications take about two to six weeks. We also provide incumbent worker training, which provides skills skills to upgrade individuals who are looking to move up in their current position, and employers are reimbursed 50% of training cost. And can I jump in just on something right there real quick, Okay. to add And we've also used incumbent worker training as a layoff version tool? So if your company is facing layoff and you have, you know, a few people that you think if they could get this certification, we could keep them on board in a different position. We've utilized utilized it for that too. Thank you, Bernadette. Thank you. We also provide on the job training. OJT dollars cover cost, to bring new talent into the workspace. Employers can request 50% wage reimbursement for a new hire while in training. OJT training covers up to six months of training or a maximum of one thousand forty training hours. With this, the employer makes all the hiring decisions. We provide the training funds. Okay. We also then oh, I'm sorry. I I can, take over this part, Bernia, because we, the workforce council can, through Jobs EQ, we're able to provide up to date labor market data and analysis like wage trends, in demand, occupations, and talent supply so employers can make informed decisions and demonstrate their impact to stakeholders. So, we also offer free thought leader roundtables and workshops, on timely employer topics. Roundtable, and workshop topics are selected based on feedback from an employer needs survey that we, the workforce council and, OhioMeansJobs we send, each year to find out, what are the top of mind topics, what what kind of challenges they're dealing with, so that we can make sure that, we are planning our, our workshops around that. So with that, I think, we we went through those really quick and I think, we're ready. We can do some open discussion and, questions, and, I guess we can finish off with that. Alright. So if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and send your questions into the q and a now. But we do have a question here, and this is from Nancy. Do Do you have any resources to help companies develop job descriptions to help them hire the best talent? I can answer that. I have worked with companies in the past, to help them with the job descriptions, and things like that. So, yes, we do have resources. That's something we have generally just done in house, you know, when companies need assistance with it. We'll come out, meet with you, go over the job, and handle that. Okay. Great. Alright. So we'll give people a few more seconds to get their questions in here. Alright. Let's see. Yeah. Allow for version tools. Yes. We do have a question here, and I'll share this on the screen. Give me just a second here. Can you tell us more about layoff aversion tools? Yes. Well, I can tell you that the state of Ohio really doesn't like to, have people laid off. So they have funding available when people get laid off, to if you want to I'll give you an example of one I did. This was a little while back, but I had a large financial institution, and they had 25 programmers. And they were all COBOL programmers, and they were gonna get laid off because they didn't have the coding skills that they needed. We worked with the company, and we told them we'd pay half the cost to upgrade their skills if they paid the other half. Well, we did that. The 25 people stayed on board. They got trained in Java, Python, you know, just further up, higher up tech skills, and they were able to keep them on. And that saved the state of Ohio quite a bit of money just by that kind of small investment into the workforce. So that's what the incumbent workers for training us for. Awesome. Thank you. Alright. And let's see. We have another question here. Alright. How can I register for thought leader roundtables? Okay. I can take that one. If you subscribe to the workforce council's, newsletter, you can find out when the upcoming, thought leader roundtables are. Our website is www.cincyworkforce.org. So if you go to our website and please sign up for our newsletter and, you will get the most recent information there, when once we have another thought leader roundtable coming up. Alright. Sounds good. Looking forward to it. Alright. So we yep. We will go ahead, and I'll pass it over to Erin for closing remarks. Well, thank you, Kayla, and thanks, Elaine and Chuck and Bernia. This was, informative just to understand what resources are available for businesses, in the region. So I wanna appreciate your time to share those with everyone. Again, a huge thank you to Paycor for sponsoring and hosting this webinar today. And as Sonya, shared with everyone at the beginning, just a quick reminder about our upcoming end of year celebration breakfast that will be May 20 at the First Financial Center, and more information is on our website. And for any golfers out there, our third annual golf outing will be on June 12, and there's also information on our website if you would like to sign up as a foursome or if you might be interested in sponsoring and getting your business name out there in the community. So with that, I just wanna thank everyone again and, wish you all a happy afternoon. Thanks, Thanks, everyone. Take care. Thank you. you. everyone.