Workforce as Economic Development: Career Pathways, Sector Partnerships, and WIOA Basics

Growing Grant CountyEconomic Development 101

Jun 8

Walk the floor of nearly any manufacturing plant in Grant County, and you will hear some version of the same conversation: the work is there, the wages are competitive, and the company would hire more people tomorrow if it could find them.

That is not a recruitment problem. It is a pipeline problem. And it is one of the clearest signals that workforce development, the work of connecting residents to training, credentials, and career pathways, is not a social-services conversation happening somewhere beside economic development. It IS economic development.

Northeast Indiana Works, the regional workforce board that serves Grant County as part of an 11-county Region 3, puts it plainly: “the available labor pool has tightened enough to slow business expansion even as wages have moved upward. Manufacturing, the region’s largest industry sector, faces a structural imbalance that will compound over the next decade: nearly one in five manufacturing workers in the region is 55 or older, while only about one in ten is 24 or younger.” Grant County cannot recruit its way out of that gap. It has to develop its way through it.

The good news is that the county already has the ingredients of a real talent system. The opportunity is to connect them more deliberately, and to make sure that every employer, municipal leader, and entrepreneur in Grant County understands what is available and how to use it.

The System Behind the Services

When people hear the term “workforce development,” they often think of a government program for job seekers. The reality is larger and more useful than that.

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), the federal law that structures the public workforce system, requires each local area to operate a one-stop delivery system that provides career services, access to training, access to partner programs, and workforce information. It also requires local workforce boards to describe, in their formal plans, how workforce investment activities will be coordinated with regional economic development. In plain terms: the federal law treats business expansion and talent development as one integrated strategy, not two separate offices.

Indiana operates 12 local workforce development areas under that framework. Grant County sits in Economic Growth Region 3, served by Northeast Indiana Works (NEIN Works). The NEIN Works board includes representation from employers, education, labor, community organizations, and economic development, with General Motors among the manufacturers at the governance table. Its WorkOne career center is located at 850 N. Miller Ave. in Marion and is the county’s public front door for workforce services.

For employers and municipal leaders, the system’s value is most visible when broken into its practical functions. NEIN Works and WorkOne can help a company fill open positions, screen candidates, run hiring events, access labor-market data, and pursue on-the-job training reimbursements. The workforce board also facilitates sector partnerships; convening employers, educators, and public partners around a shared occupational demand so that training programs and job pipelines are built around what the market actually needs, rather than what looks good on a program brochure.

What Grant County Already Has

Grant County does not need to build a workforce system from scratch. It needs to use the one it already has and understand it well enough to make it work harder.

Grant Regional Career Center (GRCC) is the upstream entry point for high school talent. Students earn technical certifications, college credits through dual enrollment, and workforce-ready skills through programs that include advanced manufacturing, with documented employer partnerships, summer programming, and work-based learning recognition. GRCC’s manufacturing programming has received outside grant support and statewide recognition for its work-based learning model. grcc.marion.k12.in.us

Grant Regional Adult Education provides free classes for adults pursuing a high school equivalency credential, along with additional postsecondary training opportunities that have recently included paraprofessional training and a construction certification course. State adult education programs can also help residents earn an occupational certificate at the same time as their credentials. grae.marion.k12.in.us

The Excel Center Marion is an adult diploma completion model that is especially relevant for residents who are working, raising families, or re-entering the labor market after a gap. The program is free, runs year-round in five eight-week terms, awards an Indiana Core 40 diploma, dual credits, and industry-recognized certifications, and wraps students in life coaching, flexible scheduling, and onsite childcare. The Marion campus is located at 1412 S. Western Ave. start.excelcenter.org

Ivy Tech Marion is the county’s most direct bridge between education and employer demand. The campus offers 32 programs, including Advanced Automation and Robotics Technology, Industrial Technology, Manufacturing Production and Operations, Smart Manufacturing and Digital Integration, Supply Chain Management, Nursing, Medical Assisting, Medical Imaging, and Paramedic Science. It also supports apprenticeships, Next Level Jobs participation, work-and-learn experiences, and a customized-training arm that allows employers to contract for training programs tailored to their own workforce. A transfer pathway to Indiana Wesleyan University simplifies the move from an associate degree to a bachelors. ivytech.edu/locations/marion

Project Leadership supports college and career readiness, providing navigation, coaching, financial-aid guidance, and early employer engagement that helps residents move from aspiration to a concrete pathway. For employers, Project Leadership is a connection point into the student and family population the county most needs to retain. projectleadership.org

WorkOne Northeast – Marion is the local public career center and the operational front door for WIOA services. Career advisors help individuals assess skills, navigate training options, access funding, and connect to employers. For businesses, WorkOne offers recruitment assistance, candidate screening, hiring events, labor-market research, and connections to financial tools including on-the-job training contracts. neinworks.org

Where the Demand Is

Two sectors define the near-term workforce opportunity in Grant County: advanced manufacturing and healthcare. Both are visible in the county’s own economic base, and both have documented pipeline challenges that make workforce investment a direct business issue.

In healthcare, Marion Health describes itself as the largest employer in the Marion area and offers a broad spectrum of services across multiple locations. The Marion VA Medical Center adds primary, specialty, and mental health care, along with Veterans Readiness and Employment supports. Ivy Tech Marion trains nurses, medical assistants, imaging staff, and paramedics. GRCC has nursing-related programming. The regional workforce plan projects thousands of additional healthcare workers will be needed in the region before 2028, with documented shortages in registered nursing, licensed practical nursing, and a range of technicians and support roles.

In manufacturing, the case is both structural and urgent. The retirement cliff facing regional manufacturers is not a distant forecast. The age imbalance, nearly one in five workers at or approaching retirement age, only one in ten under 24, means that Grant County manufacturers are not just competing for new hires; they are racing to replace institutional knowledge before it walks out the door. Projected growth occupations in the region include welders, CNC machinists, maintenance technicians, and frontline supervisors, with wages that clear the regional living-cost benchmark cited in the NEIN Works plan. WorkOne can connect workers to short-term training in welding, industrial maintenance, and CNC machining as part of its individual-services menu.

The workforce question in both sectors is the same: Grant County has the training infrastructure. The task is to make it visible, navigable, and tightly connected to actual employer openings.

WIOA Basics: What Employers and Municipalities Need to Know

WIOA is easier to use than it is to explain. Here is the version that matters for Grant County employers and local leaders.

For employers hiring new workers: WorkOne can reimburse up to 50 percent of a new employee’s wages during an on-the-job training period, compensating for the productivity gap while a new hire comes up to speed. OJT contracts are negotiated directly with WorkOne and are especially useful for roles that are hard to fill from a pre-trained pool.

For employers training current workers: WIOA allows local boards to reserve funds for incumbent-worker training, helping employed workers build skills needed to retain their jobs, advance, or avert a layoff. Separately, Indiana’s Employer Training Grant (ETG) can reimburse qualifying employers up to $50,000 for training, hiring, and retaining new or current employees in priority sectors that include advanced manufacturing and healthcare. These are not obscure programs; they are designed specifically for exactly the situations Grant County manufacturers and healthcare employers face.

For employers facing workforce disruption: Under WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) covered employers must notify not only workers and the state but also the appropriate unit of local government before a significant layoff or closure. Indiana’s Rapid Response service is then activated to coordinate immediate assistance for affected workers and the company. Mayors, county officials, and local economic developers should understand Rapid Response as part of economic resilience planning, not only as a response to bad news.

For municipalities: Local chief elected officials are formal partners in WIOA planning, not passive observers. They share responsibility for the local plan and the performance of the workforce system. That gives municipal leaders a legitimate seat at the table when it comes to aligning workforce investments with housing, transportation, and site-readiness decisions that affect labor access.

A Sector Partnership Worth Building Now

NEIN Works already identifies a Grant County sector partnership called Grant’s Got Talent, a manufacturing-focused effort to align employer demand with training capacity in the county. That is exactly the right instinct, and it deserves to be formalized and expanded.

The Growth Council, working with NEIN Works and local education partners, has an opportunity to build a Grant County Advanced Manufacturing Talent Compact, a standing employer-education partnership organized around shared occupations rather than around a single company or program. The common occupational list is already visible in the evidence: production support, welding, CNC machining, industrial maintenance, automation, quality, and frontline supervision. The partners to build around are already in place: GRCC for high school exposure and dual credit, Ivy Tech for short-term credentials and custom training, WorkOne for career guidance and OJT, adult education for residents who first need a credential, and DWD’s ETG and apprenticeship tools for upskilling.

What a formal compact adds is discipline and accountability: a shared employer demand signal reviewed every quarter, training calendar alignment across institutions, paid work-based learning commitments from participating employers, and a named contact at the Growth Council who can answer a business owner’s workforce question within five business days rather than directing them to figure out the system on their own.

The public role in this model is not to subsidize routine hiring or pick favorites. It is to do what no individual firm can do efficiently alone: convene employers around common job standards, aggregate demand across companies, align training across institutions, and reduce the friction that keeps small and mid-sized manufacturers from using tools that are already paid for.

The Employers’ Case for Engagement

A workforce system works best when employers treat it as a business tool rather than a government program. That means a few concrete behaviors.

Contact WorkOne before posting a hard-to-fill job, not after you have been searching for three months. WorkOne can provide labor-market data on wage ranges, sourcing strategies, and training pathways for the occupation in question, information that changes how a job description gets written and where it gets posted.

Explore an OJT contract before the next new hire. On-the-job training reimbursements are underused relative to the number of employers who qualify. The paperwork is manageable, and the financial case is straightforward: you get 50 percent of wages back while the new employee learns the job on your floor.

Talk to Ivy Tech’s employer-services team about custom training. If you have a skill gap among current employees, a new piece of equipment, a process change, a supervisory pipeline you need to build, Ivy Tech can design a program around your specific needs and pair it with ETG reimbursement if the training qualifies.

Engage GRCC with a real ask. Career and technical education partnerships work when employers show up with concrete offers: a paid internship slot, a piece of retired equipment for a training lab, a supervisor willing to do a site visit for a class. The schools are ready for these conversations. The limiting factor is employer initiative.

The Workforce Is the Strategy

Grant County’s 75 percent labor force participation rate is one of our strongest assets in any site-selection conversation. But a participation rate tells a company how many people are working, not whether the county can supply the specific skills a new or expanding employer needs over the next five years.

Answering that question well, and then actually delivering the answer, is the work of a talent system that is visible, coordinated, employer-facing, and tied to the county’s growth sectors. We have the pieces. Grant Regional Career Center, Adult Education, The Excel Center, Ivy Tech Marion, Project Leadership, WorkOne, and NEIN Works are each doing meaningful work. What we need now is to connect those pieces into a pipeline that a business owner can actually see, a municipal leader can plan around, and a resident can navigate from a first conversation, to a first paycheck, to a long career in Grant County.

If you are a Grant County employer with a workforce need, a hard-to-fill role, a training gap, or a pipeline question, we want to hear from you. Connect with us at communications@grantcounty.com or (765) 662-0650.