ORANGE : Mismatch of Skills, Business Needs Seen

The county’s educational and business communities are unprepared to handle the demographic changes that will sweep the work force of the 1990s, the president of a statewide public-interest group said Friday at Chapman College.

The needs of business and the skills of most workers are mismatched, said Linda Wong, president of California Tomorrow, a nonprofit social-policy research group concerned with multicultural issues.

By the year 2000, fewer than 7% of all U.S. jobs will involve unskilled labor, she said.

But immigrant workers, who will soon make up 50% of the work force in California, are not receiving the vocational and cultural training they need to participate in an economy increasingly dependent on highly skilled labor, Wong said.

Most community college and vocational school programs are “not being geared to the new economy, to training in computer and math skills or in the environmental sciences,” Wong said.

Instead, the educational programs teach skills for entry-level jobs, based on a model that Wong said hails back to the Industrial Revolution. These skills may open doors for a worker but do not prepare them for career advancement. Such short-term training keeps workers in low-level jobs and may contribute to a future labor shortage, Wong said.

Small businesses account for much of the labor demand in California, so these merchants should be the first to cooperate with colleges in developing a plan to meet the needs of an evolving economy and changing work force, she said.

Employers should realize that meeting the needs of immigrant and culturally diverse workers within a company can only “strengthen the unit as a whole,” Wong said.

She spoke to about 80 educators and business leaders at a forum sponsored by the county chapter of California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, the Assn. of California School Administrators and Chapman and Saddleback colleges.