Licking County Chamber launches unique Workenomics program
By merging its workforce and economic development efforts, the Licking County Chamber of Commerce has created an entirely new approach to business recruitment, retention and expansion.
Workenomics™ succeeds by combining these two areas into a system that can be utilized from the early days of site selection through growth and development, and can work across a wide variety of industry sectors. The intent was to create a much faster and more precise response to business needs in the county, says Kent Trofholz, director.
“Workenomics blends a lot of things into one program, which has never been done before,” Trofholz says. “It has been designed to use the talents of the Licking County workforce to bring economic development back to the county and to grow what is already here.”
The focus of the Workenomics team will include collecting demographic and labor-market information and using that to project trends for the county’s new and potential employers; making that information accessible to its community partners; and then using that data to grow and expand the various industry sectors that are already here or that have been targeted for recruitment.
Two early goals include bringing back employees who live here but work outside the county’s borders and creating internships for county students. In doing so, the program will help to create successful retention and expansion programs within the county’s existing business structure while also developing strong recruiting efforts for new businesses.
“Some of what we’re doing will be working with our local educational institutions, whether it’s a high school, community college or university, to provide internships in the business community for their students,” Trofholz says. “We want those people to graduate and become employees of the organizations they’ve been interning for, right here in Licking County.”
Workenomics also will tap into the community’s retirement population, both as a source of new employees and also as recruiters and trainers of new talent.
“We want to utilize the entire workforce that we have, so that everyone is staying in the community and giving back to it,” Trofholz says. “It’s a new approach, and it means putting a lot of different people and components together in a new way.”
Even though it’s in its early days yet, everyone in the business, education and governmental communities is eagerly getting on board, he says.
“The feedback as we’re getting up and running has been very positive. The partnering here, from the chamber team to elected officials and others, has been very solid,” Trofholz says. “Everyone here is very accommodating, and we’re going to do whatever needs to be done to make this program a success.”
