Development Authority discusses job growth

The Development Authority of Houston County held their monthly meeting on December 9, during which, Executive Director Angie Gheesling spoke extensively about industry and job growth that had potential in Houston County. “For some companies, things never slowed,” she stated. “Our industry here locally continued to hire throughout.” That, of course, happened, she added, after they were able to provide COVID-19 preventative measures for their employees. According to Gheesling, “the southeast is a hotbed right now,” driven by our port, and specifically within our community in Houston County, driven by the training that the Development Authority has worked toward providing the community in conjunction with other businesses and organizations, such as Central Georgia Technical College (CGTC).

“Our assumption is that are a lot of people’s jobs that were affected during the pandemic,” Gheesling said. And how did we respond? Our community and our local governments worked together to provide those effected employees with “pathways,” as Gheesling called them, to find tenable careers. “You may have been in this job, you may have certain skills, but here is the potential to go into a career that is sustaining, and pays well,” she said. “Now is a great time to look at those other possibilities.”

In order to get this training and job availability to the community, the Development Authority has worked with a number of partners. CGTC is one of them, providing expedited and concise job training to provide people with the knowledge they need for the jobs they want. They’ve also worked closely with the Houston County Board of Education (HCBOE) to “[expose] students to what these different high demand jobs are,” giving students, the future work force of our community, a first look, hands-on idea of what each field actually is. A project manager has also been hired to work closely on the behalf of the Development Authority with our local school systems and career academies, to “expose students to different apprenticeships in our companies, and also help the educators understand how to teach to industry needs.”

“It’s a pretty awesome undertaking,” Gheesling added. The outreach from the Development Authority to the community to provide this job training and awareness is a broad stroke effort to help the people in career growth and development.

Not only have they worked to provide this training, but also to assist in the concision of job searching. “We’re paying for a service that will go in and examine all job openings across the different platforms,” Gheesling stated. “It will take all that information and do just one job listing.” This process removes the same job opening being listed across multiple sites, and can be navigated by searching for certifications, job titles, even specific industries. This can be found at mgeaworks.com.

However, with all this growth and training being put forward by the community, the measures put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have to be called into question. “It’s impressive the measures they’ve gone through to protect people, but then to continue that really solid education and training that’s needed,” Gheesling stated, further indicating that the measures put in place are more so on the shoulders of the business. Although the Development Authority doesn’t have any guidelines themselves, according to Gheesling, these businesses and training sites are following preventative measures provided by the CDC.

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