As thousands of workers remain displaced, Nevada banks on retraining

by Michelle Rindels and Tim Lenard

A student at Western Nevada College’s Welding Technology Center in Carson City, NV on Friday, Sep. 3, 2021. (Tim Lenard/The Nevada Independent)

After three years of working as a casino security guard in Lake Tahoe, Charles Erb said he thought he had come to excel at kicking people out when they got too rowdy.

But as the company changed its security policies, he started to feel stifled. Working graveyard shifts made him feel like a zombie. And he realized he had hit a ceiling on the pay scale that he would never break through.

“The job wasn't very fun,” said Erb, 28, who later enrolled in welding classes at Western Nevada College and soon after landed a job making equipment for firefighters. “I like finally being in a job where my experience actually means something and it's actually going to be reflected in my pay.”

Nevada officials are hoping more residents will follow Erb’s lead and retrain for careers that are in high demand, especially as the state continues to lead the nation in unemployment and economists estimate that about 50,000 of the jobs lost during the pandemic will not be coming back. With nearly as many job openings available in Nevada as there are unemployed people, experts say it’s not so much a lack of available positions, but mismatches between job seekers’ experiences and the needs of employers, or the region where the most available workers are.

Agencies such as the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) have for months been urging displaced workers to “reskill” or “upskill,” and have promoted online tools such as Emsi SkillsMatch that use surveys to show workers how skills they already have from previous jobs could translate to a new field.

Read the entire article at The Nevada Independent: https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/as-thousands-of-workers-remain-displaced-nevada-banks-on-retraining