Upskilling in the Ozarks

The Greater West Plains Area Chamber worked with employers, higher education partners and community stakeholders to raise awareness of programs to help lower-income, rural learners get the training they need to access higher-paying jobs.

“We have a lot of manufacturers in our area and filling those jobs has been extremely difficult,” said Greater West Plains Area Chamber Executive Director Jessica Collins, IOM. “We’ve been able to devise programs through Southern Missouri Technical Institute and Missouri State University West Plains that address the specific needs of those manufacturers.”

Another of the chamber’s partners, Ozark Action, serves an eight-county region. Through its outreach and service to individuals and families with needs, the organization helped to spread the word about the low- or no-cost workforce development and upskilling programs.

Collins said the chamber has always had strong relationships with its partners for this project, but through this process, they’ve changed how they work together. Their meetings became more focused and goal-driven. When the organizations meet now, there is a specific purpose and a goal that they can work to address.

To measure success, the chamber is working with its employers and partners to track the number of participants in the training programs that get placed in jobs, along with the average wage increase for each learner. The chamber is also working to increase and improve employer engagement to provide more job opportunities.

As a chamber with a staff of two, Collins stressed the importance of aligning your volunteer leadership around the shift to focus on more community impact work. “We started the process about 10 years ago. We were and events and mixer kind of chamber, and our board specifically wanted us to focus more on economic development.”