A panel of experts discuss the state of today's job economy, and make the case that powering America's future requires empowering workers.
While everyone agrees creating more jobs is America's top priority, many U.S. companies, including in the energy industry, have been unable to find workers with the skills they need to compete and innovate.
At the same time, there are many veterans returning home who are looking for work, students preparing to enter the workforce, women joining the workforce in record numbers, and thousands of displaced older workers all interested and capable of making substantial contributions to the economy.
Find answers to key questions such as, How can we empower potential employees to gain the skills and training necessary to be part of the workforce of the future? How can industries, such as energy and utilities, transform their workforce to create opportunities for these workers? How can the federal government incentivize the hiring of particular groups of workers? What are examples of innovative education and skill-training that can create career paths in to high demand fields?
Join National Journal and a panel of experts - including voices from key federal agencies, companies that actively invest in skill-building, leading academics, workforce development experts, and others - as we explore what steps can be taken to better prepare these workers for jobs in the energy industry and continue to put Americans back to work.
Featured Speakers:
Caren Bohan
Managing Editor for Domestic Policy, National Journal
Jane Oates
Assistant Secretary of Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor
Alice A. Cobb
Senior Vice President, Human Resources & IT, NV Energy
Nicole Smith, Ph.D.
Senior Economist, The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
Tom Tarantino
Chief Policy Officer, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
Bio
Caren Bohan
Caren Bohan is managing editor for domestic policy at National Journal. Before that, she was a White House correspondent for Reuters. As White House reporter, she traveled around the world with Presidents Obama and Bush, covering topics ranging from international summits to the federal
budget to the policies on Afghanistan and the Arab Spring. In 2008, she was the lead correspondent for Reuters covering then-Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. She has interviewed President Obama three times, twice during his campaign and once during his presidency. Earlier in her career, Ms. Bohan covered economic policy and financial markets for Reuters, first in New York and then in
Washington. She was president of the White House Correspondents’ Association from July 2011 to July 2012. Born in Boston, Ms. Bohan earned her B.A. in English Literature from McGill University
and holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.
Alice A. Cobb
Senior Vice President, Human Resources & IT, NV Energy
Jane Oates
Assistant Secretary of Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor
Nicole Smith
Nicole Smith is a Research Professor and Senior Economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce where she leads the Center's econometric and methodological work. Dr. Smith has developed a framework for restructuring long-term occupational and educational projections. This framework forms the underlying methodology for Help Wanted, a report that projects education demand for occupations in the U.S. economy through 2020. She is part of a team of economists working on a project to map, forecast and monitor human capital development and career pathways.
Dr. Smith was born in Trinidad and Tobago and graduated with honors in Economics and Mathematics from the University of the West Indies (U.W.I.), St. Augustine campus. She was the recipient of the Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Prize for outstanding research at the Master's level at the U.W.I. and is co-recipient of the 2007 Arrow Prize for Junior Economists for educational mobility research. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from American University in Washington, D.C.
Prior to joining the Center, Dr. Smith was a faculty member in Economics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Dr. Smith taught Classical and Modern Econometrics, introductory and advanced level courses in Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Statistics, Mathematics for Economists, and Latin American Economic Development.
Her previous macroeconomic research focused on the political economy of exchange rates and exchange rate volatility in the Commonwealth Caribbean, the motivation for her M.S. thesis and a joint-publication at the Inter-American Development Bank. Her current research investigates the role of education and socioeconomic factors in intergenerational mobility. She is a co-author of "The Inheritance of Educational Inequality: International Comparisons and Fifty-Year Trends," published in 2007 by the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy.
Tom Tarantino
Chief Policy Officer, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America