The Berkshire Brain Gain
EDUCATORS AND INDUSTRY LEADERS RISE TO THE CHANGING WORKFORCE NEEDS
By Scott Edward Anderson
Walk into one of the new shop classes at McCann Technical School in North Adams and you quickly realize this is not the shop class of the past. “These days, there’s a lot of programming and coding,” says Justin Kratz, McCann’s principal, as he points to the room full of highly sophisticated tools and machines.
Indeed. In each, of the ten programs offered by McCann, the equipment is state-of-the-art, including automated machining equipment, robotic welders, and a 3D printer that, as of the start of last school year, was one of only two housed at a school in New England. “The other one is at MIT,” Kratz says with pride.
Melissa Melbe, Culinary Arts, Taconic High School, Class of ’20.
McCann, which offers both high school and postsecondary education, is one institution in a developing ecosystem that includes industry and education, as well as innovation partners such as Lever, Inc. and the Berkshire Innovation Center (BIC). Together, they are trying to address the workforce needs in Berkshire County. Those needs, echoed by several people interviewed for this article, include finding and retaining skilled workers, building awareness of the opportunities in the Berkshires, and connecting people to those opportunities.
“We need to change the narrative,” says Heather Boulger, executive director of MassHire in the Berkshires, whose mission is to promote workforce development. “The Berkshires are a great place to live, work, and play. There are awesome jobs here and so many career opportunities.”
The MassHire Berkshire Workforce Board was commissioned by the Executive Office of Labor & Workforce Development to identify the region’s critical career pathway opportunities. The board—co-chaired by Boulger, Berkshire Community College (BCC) President Ellen Kennedy, and 1Berkshire President/ CEO Jonathan Butler—had active engagement from its partners in education and economic development. The result was the “Berkshire Workforce Blueprint,” which has been used by organizations to apply for training resources and workforce initiatives and to guide post-secondary and adult training curriculum. The board is accountable to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and has to provide annual reports.
The Berkshire Workforce Blueprint identifies priority industries and occupations in the region, namely healthcare & social assistance; hospitality, culinary & management; and advanced manufacturing & engineering. The goal is to bridge the gap between the skills and experience of individuals and the needs of employers seeking to hire. In 2023, the blueprint was updated with additional crossover occupations that touch all industries in the region, including transportation, trades, and construction.
The Berkshire Workforce Blueprint provided BCC with a way to align its educational offerings to focus on the priority occupational needs in the region, says Kennedy. “Community colleges are very nimble. We can quickly roll-out a non-credit program and develop it into a credited program over time. We make sure we’re connecting where the need is.”
For example, BCC has doubled the size of its nursing program, working closely with Berkshire Health Systems, the largest employer in the region with over 4,000 employees. (It operates Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Fairview Hospital in Great Barrington, the Satellite Emergency Facility on the BMC campus in North Adams, and Phelps Cancer Center.)
“When we’re full, we’ll have around 200 students in nursing,” Kennedy says. “We’ll graduate over 100 RNs per year and 20 to 30 practical nurses.” Maureen McLaughlin, who heads up the workforce development activities at BCC, adds, “We are one of the top ten nursing programs in the Commonwealth and have the only accredited licensed practical nursing program in the county.”
This is important because the Berkshires is rapidly aging, with 60 percent of the population expected to be over the age of 50 by 2030. As a result, health services— especially nursing, Alzheimer’s care, and home health aides—may prove to be a growth employment sector for the region.
Taconic High School in Pittsfield is another educational institution helping to address workforce needs in the region. Scheduled to fully transition to Career and Technical Education (CTE), what used to be known as vocational, by 2027, Taconic moved into a 274,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility in 2018. Walking into Taconic, it feels more like a building on a college campus than a high school with its clean, contemporary design, plenty of light, and subtle touches such as color-coded floors that progress from earth tones on the ground floor to sky blue on the upper floors.
Like McCann, Taconic is keen to “change the perception of CTE as for trades only,” says Tammy Gage, assistant superintendent for College and Career Readiness with the Pittsfield School District, noting that many students go on to get engineering and other degrees at colleges and universities.
Taconic’s 14 programs include the three priority industries identified in the Berkshire Workforce Blueprint, but also traditional trade offerings such as cosmetology, carpentry, electricity, and automotive—and this new facility has top-notch training environments designed for each program. Its culinary program, for example, has a fully equipped commercial-grade kitchen and even its own restaurant, the Epicurean Room, where students learn the full gamut of what’s involved in the food service industry.
“We see Taconic as part of the solution for Berkshire County’s economic health,” Gage says. “People vote with their feet, and our enrollment went from 65 in our 9th grade exploratory career course in 2018, to 251 incoming 9th grade students this fall. The demand for this kind of edu- cational experience is great, and I think students are saying they want different experiences in high school. We’re imagining education differently.”
Lever, Inc. Executive Director Jeffrey Thomas; MCLA President James F. Birge, Ph.D.; Massachusetts Life Sciences Center President & CEO Kenneth Turner; and Berkshire Sterile Manufacturing Chief Technical Officer & Cofounder Andrea Wagner, Ph.D.
ERIC KORENMAN/MCLA
Reimagining education is also on the minds of the administration and faculty at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) in North Adams. MCLA President James F. Birge, who is originally from Lee and returned to the region eight years ago to take the helm of the college, says, “The point of a public institution should be how we best respond to the needs of society, of the community.”
To that end, MCLA has recently launched a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing, which already has exceeded projected revenue, as well as a low-residency MBA in Advanced Manufacturing in partnership with the BIC, the Pittsfield-based incubator and business development organization that, together with MCLA, sees this innovation-centered offering as a way to provide high-touch, high-impact courses to its students. Both programs offer opportunities to improve the region’s workforce in critical areas. (This fall, the BIC also plans to open a satellite facility in a recently vacated storefront at MASS MoCA, which will service the northern Berkshires.)
“We want to contribute to the brain gain in the Berkshires,” says Birge. “We specialize in giving students ways to be engaged.”
It’s not just high school and college-age students who need educational opportunities. An aging population creates another set of challenges in the Berkshires. As many reach retirement age or are already there, some will want to or need to continue working. This requires continuous learning, training, and sometimes retraining. This fall, BCC will launch a new program as part of MassReconnect, a $20 million scholarship program initiated by the Healey-Driscoll administration to support residents 25 years and older with free associate degrees and high-quality certificates. “How do we support those students and get them to come back to finish a degree?” asks President Kennedy. For BCC, this means targeting the over 17,000 residents in the county who have some college but no degree. Now they have an opportunity to complete a degree.
Students from Skills USA Taconic Chapter. SkillsUSA is a career and technical student organization serving more than 395,000 high school, college, and middle school students and professional members enrolled in training programs in trade, technical, and skilled service occupations, including health occupation.
RYAN COWDREY, CLAYSON CREATIVE
The question of continuous learning and training also led the BIC to create what it’s calling the BIC Manufacturing Academy, a training program in partner- ship with MIT, General Dynamics, the Mass Tech Collaborative, and the U.S. Department of Commerce, which in some cases takes the place of internal corporate training programs that many companies just can’t afford today. The objective, according to Dennis Rebelo, chief learning officer at the BIC, is to feed learning into workplace settings. The BIC offers a series of workshops and programming, including the TEDx Berkshires speaker event last July. “How do we motivate employees into confidence and competence?” Rebelo asks. “We do that by changing the mindset, seeing education partnerships as part of an ecosystem with industry.”
Changing the mindset of how educators, employers, and innovators work together is a sentiment echoed throughout the Berkshires—whether it’s by early college offerings, where high school students arrive at university with college credits and, in turn, a reduction in their course load and related costs; or by creating pathways to productive futures for first-generation college students, as well as immigrants new to the community. Internships, like those available to high school students from co-operative education assignments and those fostered by private organizations like Lever and the BIC for college students, provide cross-pollination between the existing and the future workforces. “Students in the co-op program land at a company, and sometimes they’re training the veterans on how to use the new software and equipment,” says McCann Principal Kratz.
Bryan Rojas, Health, Taconic High School, Class of ’22.
RYAN COWDREY, CLAYSON CREATIVE
Internships and co-ops offer students exposure to a variety of workplace environments and provide on-the-job experience that supplements classroom learning, as well as opportunities to explore career possibilities. They also provide employers with young people who often have different skillsets and perspectives than their current employees.
“A lot of companies hire interns to help with their social media because their existing staff may lack those skills,” offers Jeffrey Thomas of Lever, Inc., which has worked with about 35 Berkshire companies and organizations to provide internships. “We’re showing them what’s possible, and helping young people leave their internship with a good network in the area.”
Sarah Tomczyk graduated from MCLA in 2023 and spent this past summer working as an intern at SolaBlock, one of the companies incubated at the BIC. Originally from Plainville, Connecticut, Tomczyk transferred to MCLA from American International College in Springfield because of her interest in MCLA’s recently launched digital media program. After securing her Bachelor of Arts in Communications with a triple concentration (Digital Media Innovation, Broadcast Media, and Corporate Marketing), her assistant soccer coach suggested she’d be a good fit for the internship at SolaBlock.
Taconic High student welding in Metal Fabrication and Joining Technologies.
RYAN COWDREY, CLAYSON CREATIVE
“MCLA gives you a lot of support in the transition from college to the real world,” Tomczyk says. “They care about you and will always support you in ways a bigger school may not be able to do.” The internship has provided her with the opportunity to explore aspects of corporate communications that can’t be learned in the classroom. Working with SolaBlock, says Tomczyk, “opened my eyes to the whole marketing experience.”
SolaBlock, dual headquartered in Pittsfield at the BIC and in Troy, New York, at the Troy Innovation Garage, manufactures solar photovoltaic bricks for green building construction, and is one of the innovative companies in the region that is changing the types of businesses found in the Berkshires. Another example of an innovative company here is Denver-based EMA, which set up a materials testing facility for the space industry at the BIC in 2021. Still another is autonomous underwater vehicle manufacturer, Dive Technologies, which was recently purchased by defense contractor Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California. Then there is SEQ.io, which is creating the first secure, quantum-computing, decentralized blockchain-based platform for commercial and industrial users. Yes, blockchain. Here in the Berkshires. The region is attracting these new, innovative types of businesses that have not been traditionally associated with the Berkshires, which has historically been mostly heavy industries and hospitality. This points to a shift in what is available in the region, which, in turn, means the Berkshires can potentially attract a different kind of workforce and possibly retain some of the brain power coming out of our educational institutions.
When it comes to workforce development issues in the region, an impressive array of educators, industry leaders, and innovators are coming together to meet these challenges and chart the future. “One of the Berkshire’s biggest strengths is that workforce and education partners are passionate about helping our community,” says MassHire’s Boulger. “This ecosystem is proactively addressing local needs and willing to collaborate to make things happen.”
This spirit of collaboration is echoed by McLaughlin at BCC: “This is not a one-and- done, check-box type of situation. We must work together to build sustainable solutions. Sometimes old sayings are tried and true: ‘It takes a village.’ And for a rural area, we are all part of the workforce village.
Helpful websites
BCC’s MassReconnect Info Sessions berkshirecc.edu/admission-and-aid/massreconnect.php
MCLA’s MBA (in partnership with the BIC) mcla.edu/academics/graduate/business
MCLA’s BS in Nursing degree mcla.edu/academics/academic-departments/nursing
Taconic High School CTE program taconic.pittsfield.net
McCann Technical School mccanntech.org
Berkshire Innovation Center berkshireinnovationcenter.com