Politics                                                         

Economic development: The days
of smokestack chasing are gone

Illinois will have to use computer networks and job training to attract and keep businesses

By CHARLES N. WHEELER HI

A decade ago, Gov. James R. Thompson had just returned from a fourth trip to Tokyo. Waiting to hear whether his ardent wooing of Japanese automakers would win a Diamond-Star Motors plant, the globe-trotting governor lobbied for Build Illinois, his massive public works program that included hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and loans to lure other companies here.

By any measure, it was a golden age for the business giveaway style of economic development in Illinois. No shore seemed too distant for a gubernatorial visit, often followed by the opening of a foreign trade office; no scheme appeared too dicey to merit state largesse from the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, the state's economic development agency. Indeed, the auditor general later reported, DCCA even made grants to companies that didn't want them.

In contrast, Gov. Jim Edgar is freshly back from his first trade mission, a 10-day visit to the Middle East. That Edgar waited until his fifth year in office to make his debut as an overseas salesman for the state — Thompson was in London before his first anniversary as governor — is but the latest evidence that the heyday of smokestack chasing is over in Illinois. Like the dollar itself, the old currency of economic development bidding wars — free land, utility hookups, new roads, generous tax breaks —just doesn't carry the same weight anymore. Instead, savvy chief executives these days are more interested in what a state can do to enhance the human resources that are so critical to a company's success.

Visiting dozens of plants and factories on the campaign trail last year brought home that point, said Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra, Edgar's economic development czar. "In every one of them, the No. 1 issue was training of the work force," Kustra said. "The No. 1 issue was, 'Will my workers be capable of handling the machine that's coming in next week that is based on a computer technology that is foreign to the high school graduate of the 1970s?"'

The results of Kustra's informal survey are mirrored in a report from the Illinois Economic Development Board, an advisory panel made up of experts from business, labor, academia and government. "In a global economy, skilled, adaptive and innovative human resources are, and will continue to be, an essential pre-condition for industry competitiveness as we move into the 21st century," the board noted in its summary. "Thus, human resources and workforce development are, by necessity, an integral part of any economic development strategy." To help meet the challenge, the board recommended:

• Charging a single entity with developing and coordinating a long-term, statewide plan for human resource and workplace development. Now, there are a hodge-podge of competing and sometimes conflicting adult education and job training agencies and programs.

• Getting the private sector more effectively involved in schools so that schools teach — and students learn — the skills future workers need for employers to be competitive in the global economy.

• Revamping programs to provide easier access to education and training for the unemployed and displaced workers.

The emphasis on workforce preparation is not just a reflection of an education system which produces too many functional illiterates, although that is a critical problem. Instead, it's a recognition of a global economy driven in great measure by evolving technologies that often make yesterday's knowledge outdated by tomorrow.

"There are some basic literacy problems where people aren't learning reading, writing and arithmetic," noted Kustra, "but that doesn't mean that you can blame a school system for a worker's inability to understand a machine for which the technology didn't even exist a few years ago. It's just technology moving so quickly you couldn't expect an education of the '70s or the '80s to prepare someone for the unknowns of the '90s." Underscoring the point, a State

6/May 1995/Illinois Issues

Board of Education policy paper predicted the body of knowledge will have doubled four times between 1988 and 2000; moreover, 85 percent of the technologies we will work with then haven't even been invented yet.

But Kustra believes the technological explosion offers tools to help meet the challenges it poses. He envisions, for example, distance job training, "using advanced telecommunications and the personal computer in a way that links up workplaces with community colleges so that you can start sending job training programs across the state."

The concept is now being tested in southwestern Illinois, where an Ameritech pilot project links Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey to two nearby manufacturers via interactive video. The system enables plant employees to take college courses or customized job training directly at their worksites, said Dale Chapman, the college president.

Kustra also sees enormous possibilities for firms linked to the Internet, the vast global network of computer data bases and other information sources. For example, he said, a common problem is making sure workers are properly trained to operate new machinery, a task often left to the vendor from whom it's purchased. "If you have workplaces hooked up to the Internet, you can do vendor training over PCs," he said. "You don't need to worry about whether some guy from Germany, or wherever this crazy machine is made, can find his way onto the job site.... Hook up to the Internet and get it done."

To help make such visions a reality, Edgar tapped a Chicago banker and former Budget Bureau official, Mark Gallagher, as technology coordinator, and included in his fiscal year 1996 budget the third of five $15 million outlays to pay for a statewide telecommunications network for schools and businesses. Edgar also sought $15 million for a DCCA program that funds training and retraining for workers whose companies are expanding or modernizing here.

Computer networks and job training — not tax giveaways — are now the tools Illinois must employ for economic development. *

Charles N. Wheeler III is director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at Sangamon State University in Springfield.