Attracting talent to Birmingham

The popular business concept of workforce development may not seem like an exciting topic.

But increasing the population of well-trained professionals is critical to Birmingham’s prosperity, according to Josh Carpenter, recently appointed by Mayor Randall Woodfin as director of the city’s Office of Economic Development. 

“It’s all about talent — the recruitment of talent, the development of talent, the attraction of talent,” Carpenter said before he assumed his duties with the city in March. 

“The bottom line is we don't have the workforce we need to have the economy we want,” he said. “That type of economy is developed once we have the type of knowledge-based worker that has the dynamic skills that create jobs.”

Workforce development is crucial to Woodfin’s economic agenda, according to Carpenter.

“The vision for Birmingham is to be a hub of diverse, qualified talent that leads to prosperity for all,” he said. 

People should “look at Birmingham as a place they want to go launch their business if they are women or minority,” Carpenter said.

When Woodfin announced Carpenter's hiring, he said the young business expert and former UAB executive would help advance “inclusive economic growth by working with startups, small businesses and corporate partners to attract quality jobs to Birmingham.”

Born in Florence, Carpenter studied accounting and economics at UAB, graduating in 2010. A Rhodes Scholar, he studied social policy and politics at Oxford, earning a master’s degree in 2013 and a Ph.D. in 2014.

Carpenter served as a White House intern under President Obama and worked with Teach for America in Perry County. Formerly director of External Affairs in the Office of the President at UAB, Carpenter is still an assistant professor in economics at the school.

And Carpenter comes to his new job with strong experience in workforce development.

In 2016, Carpenter spearheaded a partnership between 15 community partners and 30 employers — the Innovate Birmingham Regional Workforce Partnership — to secure a $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. 

With that funding, he led a team to train underemployed and unemployed local youth for high-wage IT jobs.

As with Innovate Birmingham, public-private partnerships are critical in effective worker training at local colleges, including Lawson State and Jefferson State, according to Carpenter. “We need the private sector at the table to help us scope out the skills they need for their firms,” he said.

Birmingham can become more competitive and entice more companies if it can “become really good at tightly integrating its relationship between the public sector and private sector regarding skills,” Carpenter said.

At Innovate Birmingham, project partners were able to gather data from the entire city regarding nine IT occupations, including software development, “where demand is outpacing supplies,” Carpenter said.

The city can build the same kind of “data-driven” public-private partnerships in other industry sectors, including construction and health care, he said.

And Carpenter believes such efforts could attract funding from foundations and the federal government.

Woodfin also said Carpenter would focus on “helping small businesses by reducing barriers that make starting and growing a business difficult,” an allusion to the mayor’s promise to make it easier for business people to get permits and licenses at City Hall.

‘When someone comes to [the city] and says, I want to start a business, the first thing we say shouldn’t be, ‘Well, that’s complicated,’” Carpenter said with a laugh.

The Woodfin administration – with input from small-business people – will look for ways to streamline and modernize the interface between business owners and the city, as well as seeking to provide more information and resources to entrepreneurs, according to Carpenter.

He said his main overall focus in his first months as director will likely be to “understand what is working and what's not and report out on that.”

Carpenter said he and his staff will look at “everything from the website to organizational structure to [economic] incentives, the way we’ve done those in the past.”

They will also examine the economic data they’re collecting and more data they need to collect – for example, the number of women and minority business owners in Birmingham.

This data will allow the city to determine the tools and strategies it needs to achieve its goals and also to measure “the effects and outcomes of using those tools to know what’s successful and what’s not,” Carpenter said.

“We’re going to be a lot more rigorous in the way we measure our impact,” he said.

And Carpenter said that Woodfin’s campaign theme, “putting people first,” is “not a slogan, it’s a strategy.”

If the local economy succeeds, it will be because the city has helped give “people the resources they need – within reason – to be successful, to allow their businesses to grow, to thrive, to allow their talent to be realized and their dreams to be accomplished,” he said.