Community colleges tackle skills gap in land of high unemployment


Cows love alfalfa. Feeding it to them, however, involves a complicated seed-supply chain running from the farms of California’s Central Valley through a processing facility and onto trucks. In the middle are the people who manage the machines that clean the seeds, the Huffington Post reports. Finding qualified people for that highly technical job can be a challenge, said Dan Karsten, vice president of operations for S&W Seed Co. He has tried everything he could think of — from a big job fair in Fresno to ads in the local newspaper.

“You know, you go through all that effort and you meet a lot of people, but the skill set that you’re looking for is not that readily available,” Karsten said.

In the Central Valley, cursed with some of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, there are a surprising number of employers with problems like Karsten’s: jobs that are too hard to fill…

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