Governor Fallin, in conjunction with her Oklahoma Works Initiative, issued a challenge known as Launch Oklahoma.  The goal is to increase Post-Secondary Educational Attainment for Oklahomans from just 40% of the adult population to 70% by 2025.  This is a lofty goal!  I currently serve as a Key Economic Network Champion for the South Central Region of Oklahoma as part of the Oklahoma Works Initiative.  So, in my service, I plan to use my company with 175 employees as a microcosm to study this initiative.

What if HSI Sensing, as a company, was to achieve this goal of having 70% of our workforce earn a post-secondary degree, credential or certificate by 2025?

Here are my action steps:

1. Survey the employees to obtain a baseline for educational attainment
2. Determine programs available to HSI and our employees to continue their education
   -They must be meaningful to our manufacturing business so that the educational attainment makes our business better and the employee truly more valuable in their role
3. Estimate the costs required to achieve the educational attainment milestones
4. Estimate the value of increased educational attainment
5. Create a hypothetical plan to educate the workforce by 2025
6. Decide if the plan is worthy of execution
7. If justifiable, implement the educational attainment plan

I am not exactly sure what the results of this evaluation will be, but I am excited to find out.

If you own or operate a business in Oklahoma, I highly encourage you to conduct a similar evaluation.  The most feasible way to achieve the Governor’s goal is by each business taking steps like this to either fund or incentivize their employees to continue their education.  This will be done business by business, employee by employee to raise our expectations and results.

If you do take on such a study, please share the results, both positive and negative.  Knowing the reasons to take on the challenge will encourage other business leaders to begin the journey.  Knowing the obstacles to this challenge empowers policy makers to implement changes that will help business in our state.  Plus, I’m just plain curious what other business leaders think about this idea.

Photo: ©1994 Donny Harder Jr