October 19, 2022
Crain’s Detroit Business
Nick Manes
Sept. 28, 2022
A coalition of corporate IT chiefs from metro Detroit companies is coming together as part of a new nonprofit that aims to end the worker shortage in technology careers.
While officially launched in 2018, the Digital Lakes initiative has emerged from something of a hibernation period, with what leaders are saying is a new nonprofit mission and more structured leadership. Such infrastructure is needed to affect change, executives at the emerging organization say, noting that efforts to attract and retain a more skilled workforce are hardly new.
Their organization aims to offer something different.
“I think that’s where (previous efforts) have fallen on its face,” said Ronia Kruse founder and chief executive officer of OpTech LLC and OpTech Solutions, a Troy-based recruiting and staffing firm, and a co-founder of Digital Lakes. “I think that a lot of organizations claim to address a certain portion of the shortage, but it’s not being measured. And so what we plan on doing — and we’re very metrics driven — is to measure the success of these programs.”
Beyond various events and programming aimed at showing some of the opportunities on hand, executives say the nonprofit organization will partner with others in the region — such as Michigan Women Forward and Global Detroit — in an effort to bring more diverse talent into the workforce.
Digital Lakes plans to roll out its initiative Thursday night with an event at the Detroit Athletic Club.
The group has convened an advisory council consisting of CIOs and key tech leaders from Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Accenture, HTC Global Services, and BHSH, the post-merger Beaumont Health and Spectrum Health, to help in its efforts.
The problem that Digital Lakes is trying to solve has long been known as “brain drain,” wherein Michigan’s graduating college students leave the state and head elsewhere for job opportunities. The nonprofit cites data compiled by the Detroit Regional Chamber that shows more than 35% of those in Michigan studying information technology leave the state for career opportunities.
As a 2019 Crain’s column noted, education and talent retention make up fairly small pieces of the overall labor economy.
“Fact is, Michigan keeps a great many of its prized college graduates right here in the Pleasant Peninsula,” the column reads. “The ‘brain drain’ isn’t not real, but it’s also overblown and focusing on keeping talent is less important than importing it.”
Executives at Digital Lakes acknowledge that much of the brain drain fight is something of an uphill battle that various officials have been waging for decades. The goal, they say, is to showcase to students and others possibly looking to come to the region that Michigan offers a wealth of opportunities for IT jobs and within the broader technology field.
That’s particularly true given some of the companies involved in the initiative, according to Jennifer Champion, the organization’s director of operations and corporate partnerships.
“But if we can take them into those companies and showcase to them all the excitement that is happening … what a great win for both students and the companies,” Champion told Crain’s. “They’re almost getting a chance to rebrand themselves not only to talent, but to the world, and the students are getting unbelievable access.”
Many in the region’s business community will welcome any effort to address the labor crunch, where employers have been increasingly turning to robots, hiring more non-English speakers, and recruiting younger workers.
As of July, Michigan had 324,000 job openings, down 14% from the same period last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, while the state matched the national average for unfilled jobs at 6.9%.
U.S. Census data compiled by the Detroit Regional Chamber shows that as of the end of last year, metro Detroit was still down about 5,900 manufacturing jobs and 2,800 information jobs since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
