🔥 This is what workforce development looks like in action! Last week, our Houston Learning Center team hosted the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas for a roundtable on closing the skilled talent gap. Followed by a tour of our facility, they were able to show Lorie Logan and her team how we're building the next generation of energy workers. Proud of this team. 👏
This week we had the privilege of hosting the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas at the GE Vernova Houston Learning Center for a workforce development roundtable led by President and CEO Lorie Logan. Around the table: leaders from Houston City College, San Jacinto College, the Greater Houston Partnership, and the Gulf Coast Workforce Board — people who spend every day thinking about how we prepare the next generation of workers for the energy buildout. The conversation kept coming back to one thing: demand for skilled technical talent is accelerating faster than traditional pipelines can fill it. Here’s one number that stuck with the room — the average public school student gets about 26 minutes with a counselor per year, at a ratio of roughly 400 students to one. Nobody can chart a career path in 26 minutes. That’s the gap employers, colleges, and workforce boards have to close together. My favorite moment: we talked about how a high school athlete gets a signing day. A college-bound kid gets the sweatshirt. But the student who graduates with a real job already secured? Nothing. They deserve a signing day too — and through our CTE partnerships, we’ve started giving them one. Then we walked the training bays — full-size gas turbine rotors, generators, the same equipment our field engineers learn on. You can describe workforce readiness in a slide deck, or you can show it. We got to show it. Thanks to Chris Schreck and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas team for organizing, to Linda Nelson Nelson for co-hosting the tour, and to the HLC team who had the facility looking sharp