eye on business
Helping Train to Work from Afar
Kris Johnson , AWB President
With more doses of Covid-19 vaccines available every day — and as our economy continues to reopen — we are finally starting to see light ahead after a hard and sometimes dark year .
We ’ re not out of the pandemic yet , but many of us are working hard to make sure that families , community and the economy can come back strong — in every corner of our state .
One thing we ’ ve learned from this last year is that if you can work from home , you can work from anywhere . This presents tremendous potential to help people in rural Washington find jobs in non-traditional , flexible work settings — but first they need a little training to take advantage of the new virtual landscape of remote work .
To help capitalize on the new digital workspace opportunities created by technology and now accelerated by the pandemic , the AWB Institute has been working with Washington State University Extension and other partners to test a remote worker certification program .
It ’ s an idea inspired by a similar program through the Utah State University Extension , which they call a master remote work professional certification .
Our regional pilot program was an online course that helped rural residents who are unemployed or underemployed learn how to use online tools like Zoom , Trello and Slack , all with the goal of helping equip them to land a job while allowing them to stay in their home communities .
The program kicked off with two cohorts of regional participants who spent four weeks learning from nine WSU Extension faculty .
Following the successful pilot program , we ’ re working with WSU Extension to take the program statewide .
This project works because of cooperation between employers and public-sector partners like WSU Extension . We ’ re grateful for the leadership of companies like Microsoft and our partners at GWATA , along with Confluence Health , the Columbia Basin Foundation and Okanogan County WorkSource .
One of my favorite parts of the program is that it was focused on helping our rural residents , who have so often been left behind as more urban parts of our state have seen tremendous economic growth over the past decade . AWB has been working for years to help support jobs and opportunity in rural Washington , and this project is an important new piece of the puzzle .
With the economy ( and housing prices ) red-hot in the Puget Sound area , it just makes sense to help equip rural residents to do that work remotely . It ’ s a win-win proposition — helping bring jobs to areas in need of opportunity , while making a new and well-trained rural workforce available to urban employers who are struggling to find talent .
This project was one key part of a bigger project that the AWB Institute is leading . It ’ s a big-picture look at transforming our state for the better that we call Washington in the Making . From a statewide dashboard showing our state ’ s “ vital signs ” to a growing internship portal , this is boots-on-the-ground work to get Washington trained and working .
As heartening as it is to see our state beginning to look at a post-Covid future , it ’ s even more exciting to see how the AWB Institute is helping lead our state to build back even better .
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