Chris Koehler:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Frantz Ward’s podcast series Shoveling Smoke. I’m Chris Koehler, a partner of Frantz Ward, your host for today’s podcast. While many of our podcast discussions have centered on legal perspectives, we also like to focus on business and economic development issues that affect us all in Northeast Ohio, whether you’re a business owner, a service provider, or an employee. Today our guest is Jacob Duritsky. Hi, Jacob.

Jacob Duritsky:
Hey, Chris. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Chris Koehler:
Great, thanks. Jacob is the Vice President of strategy and research at Team NEO. He’ll tell you more about Team NEO in a second, but Jacob leads Team NEO’s research and strategy efforts to aid business development in the region. The information he and his team develop helped Team NEO’s partners and local communities engage in targeted and sustainable economic growth. We’ll dig a bit deeper into that, but our primary discussion today will be regarding his team’s annual report, which is called Aligning Opportunities, that analyzes the talent, demand and supply gap in our region, and the opportunities and challenges that flow from that.

Jacob holds a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies from the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State. I’ve heard Jacob speak several times and always walk away with new insights into the economic state of Northeast Ohio. Again, Jacob, welcome. For those who might not be familiar with the organization, what does Team NEO do?

Jacob Duritsky:
Sure. Again, thanks for having me. Team NEO is a regional economic development organization founded in 2003 that represents 18 counties in Northeast Ohio. For listeners, think the primary markets of Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Youngstown define the territory. It’s four million people. It’s two million workers. It’s $250 billion in GDP and about 40% of the state’s economy. What we do is try to help companies that are here in Northeast Ohio grow, as well as attract new companies to the region who are thinking about making new investments in Northeast Ohio or in the State of Ohio. We do that through really four strategies.

The first and the one we’re going to talk the most about today is talent. Talent is in more than 90% of the deals that we do, listed as the number one issue companies are facing. The second is we try to do it through the future of industry and innovation. What are emerging technologies and new technologies we can focus on? The third is building a good robust inventory of sites. As we think about companies looking to make investments, do we have the right property for them to even invest in? And then finally, we try to market what Northeast Ohio does to the nation and the world, frankly, through our work.

And then the final thing I’ll add is we’re also the JobsOhio partner for Northeast Ohio. We represent the state economic development group, JobsOhio, throughout the 18 counties of Team NEO’s footprint. JobsOhio is unique and that it is funded through the sale of liquor in the state of Ohio, which was done because during downturns and when there was less tax revenue under Governor Kasich, they wanted to have a way to continue to fund economic development so that we wouldn’t slow down momentum. Anytime any of your listeners might be having a spirited beverage, you’re indirectly supporting me. Thank you for that. Keep going.

Chris Koehler:
We should have arranged this better. We could have had a spirited beverage while we’re talking.

Jacob Duritsky:
You could have contributed.

Chris Koehler:
Next time. You said that Team NEO both works attracting new investment and development from, I guess, outside sources and helping current businesses. Is there one focus over the other or is it pretty even?

Jacob Duritsky:
It’s actually far more about the businesses that are here today. We kind of use the 80/20 rule. About 80% of the deals that we do happen here with Northeast Ohio companies who are looking to grow. I’ll give you an example of that. Sherwin is almost across the street, right, building their new headquarter and their new R&D center down in Brecksville. That would be an example of what we would call a retention deal where we’re keeping the company here, they’re adding new labor, they’re adding new talent and making a significant capital investment as well. Conversely, think about what everyone’s talking about right now, Intel.

Intel made a significant investment. That project actually originated out of Lorain County, but we didn’t have a site that could accommodate them, so they ended up north of Columbus. A lot of people will say, “Well, were we in competition for Intel?” No, not really. The size of the site they ultimately took on for your least Northeast Ohio listeners was about the size of the city of Lakewood. It was a huge piece of property. But what does that mean for us? There are more than a hundred companies we’ve identified so far that can be potential suppliers to Intel and stay here in Northeast Ohio and potentially grow because of it.

That’s where we think about even in attraction opportunities. We didn’t land Intel, but it leads to an opportunity for us given our manufacturing here, our manufacturing base, a significant opportunity to be a major part of the value chain in the value proposition for a company like that.

Chris Koehler:
You don’t think Intel’s opportunity in Central Ohio will be limited there and it’ll cascade over to Northeast Ohio as well?

Jacob Duritsky:
Absolutely, yeah. Some of it’s going to be on the tangible supply side, as they need chemicals and plastics and polymers and pieces of equipment. But one of the things if you look at semiconductor industry in Northeast Ohio that they’ve also leveraged a great deal of already is things like your offices, legal. There’s a huge legal footprint. They’ve taken advantage of that, not just Intel, but other semiconductor companies all over the nation, finance, headquarters operations. There are a lot of different ways to think about how we as a market can be competitive and align ourselves with what Intel is doing.

Chris Koehler:
Well, good. That’s interesting. I’ve already gotten a soft topic by chasing that rabbit down a hole because what I’d really like to talk about is your Aligning Opportunities Study because I know you and particularly your team within Team NEO is very involved in that. What is Aligning Opportunities?

Jacob Duritsky:
Aligning Opportunities is in its sixth year. It’s a report that we publish annually, originally funded by The Cleveland Foundation here locally, to look at the talent supply-demand mismatch that we see in the community. One of the challenges that we have seen, not just Northeast Ohio, a lot of parts of the country have seen is that there are a significant number of jobs going unfilled by local talent. The Cleveland Foundation funded us to do this study to say how does that relate to Northeast Ohio’s economic base and the talent that we have here?

What we found initially through the first report, but continues six years later to the state is that we have significant gaps in IT and tech and think even more broadly, STEM, gaps in healthcare, and gaps in manufacturing labor. In any given year, 50 to 55,000 jobs are going unfilled by Northeast Ohio residents. The goal of Aligning Opportunities and how it really started us down this path of thinking more holistically about talent was how can we connect more people here to more opportunities in the marketplace and give our employers a competitive advantage in terms of who they could hire and who understood the labor market.

Chris Koehler:
When you say gap, are you referring to we have the job openings but not the workers, or we have the workers but not the job openings?

Jacob Duritsky:
Yeah, it’s the former. We have the job openings but not the workers. If you look at our marketplace, first, 65% of jobs in Northeast Ohio by 2025 are projected to have a need for some type of post-secondary credential. The level of experience is increasing. But what we’re also seeing is that we haven’t pushed people towards some of the most in-demand jobs in the economy. I think we’ll talk about the racial implications, the gender implications of that, but one way to think about it is through the way we’ve thought about how the region is marketed and not through Team NEO, but through maybe perception. You’ll hear people talk about areas like Northeast Ohio is the Rust Belt.

I think what’s done over the past couple of decades has kept people out of, for instance, production occupations in the manufacturing field when we know that we have over the next five to seven years 100,000 potential job openings in manufacturing and production occupations alone based on the fact that we have an aging workforce and people leaving those jobs. They’re very new in very different types of jobs. A part of what we’re trying to do through these wards is not just say, “Yes, there’s opportunity,” but it’s to show different audience, whether that’s young people or adult learners, there’s opportunity here and then try to connect that to passion and how they can pursue it in more meaningful ways.

Chris Koehler:
Where do you get the data that goes into your report?

Jacob Duritsky:
The data comes largely from private sources. Two that have actually merged now, they were called Economic Modeling Specialists International, which was a tool that we used to understand the employment base, and then another tool called Burning Glass, which is kind of like Indeed, but analytics on steroids. That’s where we really derive much of the data from, but a lot of this is publicly available. A lot of it you can go to federal sources, things like the census, or some of the national college education statistics data. You can get a lot of this data as well. What we try to do is make it consumable and to really emphasize the areas that we think need impacted the most.

Chris Koehler:
Who’s the information intended for?

Jacob Duritsky:
There are several audiences. We have internally what we’d call our Talent Development Council. We bring it together quarterly. It brings together 16 presidents of higher education institutions. It brings together 13 business leaders, and then some of our workforce partners throughout the region as well. Think of an organization like Magnet that focuses on manufacturing. We bring them together to have a conversation about once we have this data now, what do we do to develop solutions to this? And that’s been an evolution and a journey.

But a part of what we’re trying to do is when that Sherwin-Williams comes to us and says, “Hey, we want to make an investment,” and I’m making this number up, but philosophically it’s sort of the right direction, “We need 250 software developers<” we don’t need to go to 25 different colleges and higher education institutions throughout northeast Ohio to get them that. We have a system in place that says, “Here’s how we can execute. Here’s how we can deliver.” If Sherwin wants to be up and running by 2024-2025, we have a way to get you that talent and we have a way to sell it. That’s the first part.

All that we do in the talent work is informed by Aligning Opportunities, but really intended to make us more competitive as a market for companies that are here and as a way to sell to outside companies. But we’ve also thought about it in a broader context too. One of the things we’re doing that I found really interesting is focusing more on emerging talent, six through 12th graders, working with folks like Junior Achievement, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Delta Dental and partners throughout the community to have conversations with people at a much younger age about the fact that there are these really good career opportunities here and connect passion back to the opportunity that exists.

I often joke, I have two daughters. I have a 20 year old, I have an eight year old. My 20 year old is a junior at Kent. She’s going for psychology and fashion, and my eight year old wants to be a YouTuber. Not necessarily the most in-demand careers right now, but they might not listen to me, but some people do, and connecting young people and their passion through this great infrastructure of companies and organizations we have in Northeast Ohio to young people I think is how long-term we start to think about some of these solutions.

Then finally, I’ll just skip a shout out to a new organization that we’ve partnered with, the Cleveland Talent Alliance, which is really focused on retaining and attracting new talent to the region. We keep about 47% of our students in Northeast Ohio that go through programs here, which isn’t bad actually compared to some markets, but we can do better. If we grew that by 10 to 20%, we would see the level of bachelor’s plus engagement grow by 2,500 to 3,000 new educated folks here in the region any given year. We have tons of opportunity. It’s how we capitalize on it.

Chris Koehler:
This isn’t just about graduate degrees or bachelor’s degrees, is it? I mean, do you talk about associates or degrees or the trades?

Jacob Duritsky:
Absolutely. It includes everything from certificates up through postgraduate and professional degrees. Some data is harder to get. Candidly, the trades data can be a little bit hard because they don’t necessarily have a traditional talent funnel like some of our two years, four years and certification programs do. But it includes everyone. I think what’s important about that question, and it’s a good one, is that it isn’t just about get a bachelor’s and push everyone through a four-year program. I think it’s about exploring the new opportunities that exist, particularly in a post-pandemic economy for people to participate in a lot of different meaningful ways and the ways they can engage.

I don’t want to call it simple in terms of anyone can do it, but as simple as a three month coding bootcamp in terms of time. I mean, if you go to a coding bootcamp right now, think Tech Elevator or something like that, you’re going to be sought after by most of the tech employers in Northeast Ohio. There are very, very different pathways. What we’re trying to promote is that training of some sort, retraining of some sort for folks who maybe have been in the labor market and aren’t anymore is just going to continue to grow on importance.

Chris Koehler:
That’s how the sausage is made. Let’s talk about this year’s report. What conclusions did you come up with?

Jacob Duritsky:
This year’s report, and this isn’t surprising, didn’t show that much has necessarily changed. Certainly it continues to highlight the fact that IT and tech workers who are embedded in everything we do. We’re not Silicon Valley, but we have firms like yours that we’re talking to today, professional services firms, all which needs technology. I think there are two tech folks on the call with us right now. It’s hugely impactful to the base of companies that we have. That manufacturing continues to be very in demand, but the skills we’re seeing for manufacturing are evolving and they’re evolving to think about new technologies in the future of Industry 4.0.

Think about things like the industrial internet of things, additive manufacturing, electric vehicles, semiconductors, all of this is very much the future. How do we connect people to these emergent opportunities in the future of work? And then finally, I think it goes without saying for at least most of our Northeast Ohio listeners, we have a huge, huge healthcare footprint here. Registered nurses continue to be the number one area where we see demand for folks, but we’re not filling it in the right way. I think as we think about those challenges and those opportunities, that’s really led us to think about different ways to approach this conversation.

It’s not just about talent, but we’ve subsequently released few additional reports, one called Misaligned Opportunities that looks at the impact of race on the talent severity, one called Lost Opportunities that looks at the impact of gender in the workforce in a post-pandemic environment, and just recently, Untapped Opportunities, which looks at veterans in the workplace. The way we’re thinking about it and what Aligning Opportunities has led us to do is to have a much broader set of conversations about these issues with more stakeholders in the community and to start to think more deeply and differently about what solutions look like.

Chris Koehler:
Now, for people who might be skeptical when they hear about initiatives like that or studies that you’re doing when they hear about diversity or equity issues and think it’s more of a political issue, how do you convince them that it’s not political, it’s more of an economic issue?

Jacob Duritsky:
Well, we call it a business imperative. You can take any of the political environment out of the discussion. But if you look at the fact of what Northeast Ohio’s talent base is going through right now, since 2001, we’ve lost about 150,000 workers. We’ve lost 150,000 people in the region overall. We’ve got a workforce that’s 5% older than the country as a whole. The way I tend to put it is we can’t simply grow our way out of this. We have to think about connecting people who are here in more meaningful ways to better opportunities that exist in the economy. To do that, it means we have to be more creative about what we do and give everyone a chance to engage.

We’ve looked at work that the Fund for Our Economic Future, one of our partners here in the region, has done, for instance, which showed that to get a resident from Slavic Village on the east side of Cleveland to the city of Solon for potentially a good manufacturing job and use public transit, it can take 90 minutes each way and two different buses and upwards of 40 or 40 plus different bus stops. We have to find sustainable solutions to these things. Again, it’s not a political issue, it’s a reality of what businesses need to fill these in-demand jobs and that we have to think differently about who can fill them and then how we offer opportunities to people to do that.
I’ll share one other example with you, not to belabor the point, but I think it demonstrates what we’ve seen in the marketplace. We were talking to a young student, happened to be African American, in this case, male, who really wanted to go into criminal justice and said, “Oh, that’s great,” and said, “Have you thought about cybersecurity?” What we are seeing is technology, IT. The future job growth is going to be highly embedded in technology. Criminal justice and cybersecurity go well together. You’re employed for the rest of your life. He said, “Well, no, no one’s ever really talked to me about the connection.”

That’s the opportunity we have is start connecting dots for people and to bring everyone into the workforce in more meaningful ways.

Chris Koehler:
I assume you’re working with educational institutions to get them to respond to the data and tailor programs and help address the gap?

Jacob Duritsky:
We absolutely are. We’re working with everyone from… I mentioned the two year and four years that we work with, and that’s pretty consistent within that group, but we’re also working with high schools. We’ve been in Rhodes High School having conversations with students. We’ve been in Warrensville Heights City School District. We’re doing work out in Lorain.

We’re doing a program now called Career by Design with Lorain County Community College and other partners throughout the community, which emphasizes these in demand areas of the economy to high school advisors, to college advisors, anyone who’s going to have an interaction with a student that can be meaningful, trying to get them not just to think about the programs that exist and the traditional pathways that maybe folks have explored, but getting them to understand the market demand and where the market is going. We’re trying to be really creative with it.

And then, as I mentioned, we have tremendous partners throughout the region like Goodwill Industries, like Junior Achievement, Youth Opportunities Unlimited. I can’t name them all because there are so many of them. But we can leverage them to take this message and then really start to enhance our reach and our scale and our scope and our ability to spread this to a broader array of communities. One final example of that. During the pandemic, there was a program called Ohio To Work, and Ohio To Work was taking people who had been laid off during the pandemic and thinking about retraining and reskilling.

We partnered with organizations like Ohio Means Jobs, like the Urban League of Greater Cleveland, who we hadn’t traditionally necessarily had formal relationships with and it was very successful. But that’s led to now a different way we can engage in the community in a different set of relationships and conversations that we can have. Because at the end of the day, and I’ll share this with everyone, I don’t know if Chris wants me to or not, I happen to work for his brother at Team NEO, Bill, but one of the things I have learned from Bill is that this isn’t just about the data, it’s about strategy alignment.

The more people we can bring into this conversation regardless of age, gender, race, organization, public, private, nonprofit, the more we can start to think about strategy alignment. And that’s ultimately what becomes most important in this.

Chris Koehler:
You’ve been talking mostly about developing people with the skills or developing the skill sets to fit current opportunities. Is there a flip side where you’re trying to bring jobs into the market that fit the current skills?

Jacob Duritsky:
There is. We talked more on the strategy level around our talent data, but what we’re trying to do every day through the work that Team NEO does in the trenches is try to sell to companies the base of talent that we have here. What I don’t want people to take away is there’s no hope. Let’s just all close up shop. There’s still plenty of talent, plenty of organizations, plenty of opportunities to sell that. And that’s why you see a company like Sherwin-Williams continuing to commit to Northeast Ohio because they know we have a base of talent and they know we can develop it at the same time.

We talk to somewhere around a thousand companies a year to have what we would call BREs, business retention expansion calls, where we go out and ask them what we need. Talent is still a huge asset that we have here. We still have those two million workers that I talked about. All is not lost. We can just do a better job of aligning it, and it absolutely makes us more competitive and is still a point of competitiveness for us that we sell all the time.

Chris Koehler:
For companies or businesses like our clients, what do you say to them? How do they get involved in this process to help address the gap or take advantage of some of the opportunities that you’re seeing out there?

Jacob Duritsky:
Well, I would say first and foremost, if you’re a client of your firm or anyone else’s who is thinking about making an investment, pick up the phone and call. Because oftentimes we can help in ways. Sometimes they’re financially driven through incentives and things like that or tax credits, but other times we can be consultative and be a resource that can connect you to other assets in the system. Before you work with one of your clients or one of your clients thinks about making that investment, reach out because we can often help, even if it’s not clear initially how we can. That would be, first and foremost, what I would say to anyone.

I would say to others in the community who want to be engaged in this type of a conversation, lend your voice to it. Lend what you do to this cause and make it meaningful. I’m not suggesting there aren’t a lot of people that do that already, but what we need and what often drives change is a very, very active business voice that says, “Here’s what we need. Here’s what we need to see.” And then we can help through forums like the Talent Development Council be responsive to that and help our higher education partners engage in the right way with our business partners to get things done.

Chris Koehler:
I can attest to the fact that you guys can play matchmaker with other organizations or provide concrete help. We’ve been able to help some of our clients with that. You’re right. The first step is a call to somebody to see what opportunities are out there.

Jacob Duritsky:
Absolutely.

Chris Koehler:
Jacob, at the end of our podcast, we usually ask guests to leave listeners with two or three takeaways. What do you have for us today?

Jacob Duritsky:
We need more people engaged in the economy from a talent perspective. Long-term, are we going to try to develop retention-attraction strategies? Absolutely. But right now we need to think differently about how we connect everyone to the economy. The second, there is lots of demand. As I talked about, there are 50 to 55,000 jobs, good paying, family sustaining wage jobs that go unfilled in any given year and that hasn’t really changed over six years. We have to connect more people, and it has to be everyone. We have to highlight these opportunities.

And then third, this is a key component of what we think about every day at Team NEO. To your last question, as you have clients, as folks are thinking about making investments, reach out. There’s a system, not just us, the Greater Cleveland Partnership and partners in Akron and Youngstown, or partners like Ohio Means Jobs and others that are here to help and are built to assist companies who are looking and thinking about making investments.

Chris Koehler:
That’s great information. Is the Aligning Opportunities report available to the public?

Jacob Duritsky:
It absolutely is. The easiest way to probably find it is to just Google Team NEO Aligning Opportunities, but you can also go to our website, teamneo.org, and certainly find it there as well.

Chris Koehler:
I think I could probably throw a link to it up on our page if I can figure that out technically.

Jacob Duritsky:
Great. That’d be awesome.

Chris Koehler:
Thank you so much. As I said, I always learn something when I talk to you, and I’m glad to get some more information on the current opportunities available to us and our clients.

Jacob Duritsky:
Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Koehler:
Sure. That wraps up another episode of Shoveling Smoke. Thank you for checking in with us and we hope you listen next time. Shoveling Smoke is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer and audio engineer is Sean Rule-Hoffman. Thanks for listening.