< Previous98 JULY 2021 S I T E S EL E C T I O N takers of resources, but community builders. It resonates. “We earn the respect of the entrepreneurs because they see we are leaders in our community, building the entrepreneurial system we operate in,” Holekamp says. If there is one challenge now, it’s the same as everywhere else: talent provision. A focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is one avenue NEXT, Clemson, Furman and others are taking. Ken Brower, interim CEO, NEXT Upstate, says 33 of the 121 companies NEXT supports are female- or minority-owned, and the most recent Zoom call had the most diverse crowd he’d seen in a long time. But he knows there are many more faces to be discovered. “While we support 121 companies, there are probably 400 we should be involved with,” he says. “We are making a very intentional effort.” Among the spaces in the Upstate breathing life into the entrepreneurial scene is Village Launch, which “exists to equip and enable under-resourced entrepreneurs to become providers, creators and contributors in their community,” and is part of Mill Community Ministries in Greenville, headed by Furman University alumnus Dan Weidenbenner. Herrera calls the social enterprise organization the town’s “best kept secret,” with a roster of entrepreneurs that is 90% Black, and fast-growing numbers of women and Hispanic founders. An additional 7-acre innovation district is rising along Poinsett Highway, within an Opportunity Zone on land between Greenville and the Furman campus. The project is a collaboration between Hartness Development, Furman University and its Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship. With plans for Flywheel Coworking and others to invest there, the district is intended to provide entrepreneurs of all demographics with access to resources. Furman’s I&E office itself is forging new partnerships: University President Elizabeth Davis announced in December that the Furman I&E would move into NEXT on Main. The move came a year after the NEXT Fellows program launched in order to engage and retain top entrepreneur talent at Clemson University and Furman. “It’s much easier to have a seat at the table and to help bring organizations together around a table when that table is literally steps away in a shared space,” Herrera said. “This is an excellent opportunity for our students, faculty and staff to engage in meaningful work with the city,” said Davis, “and to help make Greenville a leading innovation hub in the country.” Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport (GSP) is building on its award-winning passenger service with growing cargo activity, sparked in part by a $33 million facility investment in 2019. Photos courtesy of GSPTALENT ATTRACTION Connecting Skills To Opportunities The State of Nevada is on top of things. For close to 10 years, they’ve been focused on where industry is going and what it means for the future of work in the state. State leaders like Bob Potts, deputy director at the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) have recognized its legacy industries (gaming, entertainment, and tourism) have been on a maturing path for decades. They’ve thus been working to identify the state’s comparative advantages in various industries to better diversify. “We looked at advanced manufacturing, technology, healthcare, logistics and operations, and energy,” Potts said. “We were doing reverse staffing patterns for those sectors, looking at their workforce, seeing what our inventory was, where our gaps were compared to the national average. We looked at location quotient, STEM occupations, real-time data — all that.” Potts and his team at GOED use this labor market knowledge to provide guidance, education, and workforce support across the state. “The data drives those strategies,” added Stacey Bostwick, director of workforce development at GOED. “What are the assets we have in those targeted industries? What gaps are we trying to fill? We use those to have conversations with industry, coordinated with education partners, and ask, ‘How can we do this and what’s working and what’s not working?’ ” The data-driven strategies have been working. “Great strides were made in the last decade and it really plays out in the numbers,” Potts said. But COVID-19 has threatened those gains. Almost overnight the state was faced with the problem of transitioning workers — many of them from the large hospitality sector—into new opportunities. To do this, the state needed to look at the market through a different frame of reference than traditional labor market data. But the answer wasn’t new data. It was expediting implementation of skills data they had already begun working with. Responding to COVID with Skills Nevada hit a labor force participation rate low of 58% in May 2020. While that number has rebounded to 62% in March 2021, it’s still well below its pre-COVID level of 65% a year prior. Getting dislocated workers into in-demand jobs is tough work under normal circumstances. Doing so in the wake of a worldwide virus outbreak complicates things a bit. “You’re in the right place at the wrong time,” Bostwick said. “Because being in a workforce space during the pandemic, your work is exponentially more challenging and difficult, especially in Nevada.” But to meet the challenge, Nevada is leveraging skills data, which allows them to be more responsive and personalized in its support of jobseekers. Skills Nevada SkillsMatch begins with the unique jobseeker, who self-selects skills acquired through education, training, past experience and everyday life. by DREW REPP, CONTENT MANAGER, EMSI BURNING GLASS editor@siteselection.com S I T E SE L E C T ION JULY 2021 99100 JULY 2021 S I T E SE L E C T I ON describe someone’s knowledge, experience or ability. Skills are the language used by people (in their resumes and online profiles), employers (in their job postings), and education institutions (in their syllabi). Too often people sell themselves short by believing that only formal education or particular job titles demonstrate their ability to perform a task. By examining people and jobs through the lens of skills, the range of pathways and opportunities available to jobseekers becomes clearer. Potts summarizes the power of skills data this way: “Skills help folks think about the anatomy of themselves, and businesses to think about the anatomy of themselves, differently than what we traditionally do when we talk about job titles, degrees, whatever it might be.” Putting Skills Data to Work COVID accelerated the need to put the power of skills data to use. Using Emsi Skills they de- ployed Nevada SkillsMatch, an online platform to help displaced workers identify their skills and receive personal career and educational recommen- dations. To make local education recommendations, Emsi mapped nearly 1,800 programs and more than 18,000 courses to skills sought by employers in job postings. Unlike a job board, Nevada SkillsMatch begins with the unique jobseeker, who self-selects skills ac- quired through education, training, past experience and everyday life. Additionally, jobseekers identify the skills they would like to learn. The end result is that they receive personalized recommendations to get them from where they are to where they want to be. All based on skills. Connecting people, educators, and employers in this way has long been recognized as a need. But different databases, coding systems and manners of data collection have prevented much progress. Fortunately, using the language of skills allows for data from all three areas to be aggregated in one platform and make far better connections for jobseekers. Nevada SkillsMatch went live in January of this year. By March it had 2,100 unique visitors, 68% of which explored job postings and 16% learned about a course or program. Leaders such as Potts and Bostwick are excited about being able to connect with jobseekers in this way. “The discovery for individuals once they engage with the platform is hugely attractive,” Potts said. “And it’s encouraging at a time when encourage- ment is paramount for a lot of folks. That’s a pretty cool thing. You can actually use a data platform to encourage people.” Joining Potts and Bostwick in mobilizing Nevada SkillsMatch is Isla Young, who serves as the execu- tive director of the Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation (OWINN). OWINN’s purpose is to help drive a skilled, diverse, and aligned workforce in the state by promoting cooperation and collabo- ration among all entities focused on workforce de- velopment. Young echoes Potts’ sentiments: “Part of Emsi SkillsMatch is providing people the realization that you are valuable, you are special, you do come to the table with skills that you can use. And let’s help you connect with these different high growth and high demand areas in Nevada.” As the long-term impacts of the pandemic and recovery efforts continue to play out, Potts and Bostwick anticipate even more people will turn to the tool. While many displaced workers began searching for another opportunity, many others held out hope their job would come back. But if they sense that likeliness fading, or the job they are able to return to looks much different, their need to identify how their skills transfer to a new opportunity grows. “Data seem to indicate that a large contingent in the workforce were expecting their job to come back. But one of the more recent trends that we’ve been seeing is that as things are opening up those jobs aren’t coming back,” noted Bostwick. “And so people who were optimistic or ideally that was their first choice, that was their priority, find they must adapt.” High hopes of their job returning isn’t the only factor causing workers to hold out. “It’s a very wonky time,” Potts said. That’s because factors such as unemployment insurance benefits, stimulus checks, lack of childcare and concerns about workplace safety are keeping people out of the labor market, even as employers are looking to fill openings. In discussing the overall job counts in the state being down, but recent unemployment rate improving, Potts pointed out the oddity: “How can you have both of those things Nevada SkillsMatch went live in January of this year. By March it had 2,100 unique visitors. (Continued on page 139)102 JULY 2021 S I T E S EL E C T I O N Which Way for Rural America? Site Selection identi es top performers and digs down on their success. The challenges facing rural America are well-known and exhaustively documented. Chronically shrinking populations beget shrinking tax bases and shriveling public services. Town squares board up. Hospitals close. e most promising youth light out for elsewhere, just as lack of reliable internet now helps to quash most any notion of winning back folks from the city, post-pandemic. It’s also been noted that many rural communities have fallen victim to a vicious cycle. “Some communities are dominated by people that really don’t want any change,” says Ron Tillery, executive director of the Phelps County Development Corporation in Phelps County, Nebraska, a top performer in this Site Selection examination of rural economic development. “Change,” Tillery argues, “is not a choice. And if you want to in uence that change to the positive, you’ve got to take concrete steps to make it happen. at’s going to be the di erence for those communities that are going to survive and thrive in the future, whether it be years from now or years from now. Communities that can’t embrace that,” Tillery warns, “they’re going to fail. We see examples all around.” Of the , counties and county- equivalent units in the United States, , do not belong to any established Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), according to Daniel Boyer, director of programming and analytics for Conway Data, Inc. ose counties can thus be considered “non-metro” or “rural.” To identify rural counties that found success in economic development RURAL AD V ANT A GE by GARY DAUGHTERS gary.daughters@siteselection.com Corn grows in Phelps County, Nebraska SOURCE: Phelps County Development Corporation Which Way for Rural America?104 JULY 2021 S I T E S EL E C T I O N in 2020, Conway’s Boyer mined for projects within those counties that merited inclusion in the Conway Projects Database that tracks significant capital investment, job creation or physical buildout by corporate end users. Among the findings: • A total of 196 rural counties — roughly 15% — registered at least one qualifying investment of $1 million or more, 20 new hires or 20,000 sq. ft. of new buildout. • The most qualifying projects in a single rural county was six, a distinction shared by Tillery’s Phelps Co. and Marion County, South Carolina. • Kentucky had 19 rural counties with at least one qualifying investment, the most of any state, followed by Virginia, Texas and Georgia (see map chart). • Only eight rural counties registered more than two qualifying investments; 19 states had none at all. • As also tends to be the case with projects in metropolitan counties, states in the Sunbelt and Midwest predominate among leaders for rural investment. • Nestle Purina PetCare’s $550 million expansion of its pet food manufacturing facility in Hart County, Georgia, was the most lucrative rural project announced in 2020. Follow-on interviews with officials in the most successful counties of 2020 revealed a striking consensus. Without fail, they stressed the need for increased public and private investment in infrastructure, education, workforce development, water and sewer systems, shovel-ready sites, amenities and housing. Top Rural Counties 2020 (by total of qualifying projects) County, State Project Count CAPEX Jobs Company (millions) Marion, South Carolina 6 $31.80 442 Leisure Pools and Spa Mfg. $6.10 200 Maxwood Furniture $5.80 30 Mechanical Alliance Co. $4.00 12 Rivers Plumbing & Electric $9.10 150 Dma Holdings $3.90 25 Pee Dee Extractors $2.90 25 Phelps, Nebraska 6 $119.60 147 Becton, Dickinson & Co. $70.00 20 Becton, Dickinson & Co. $40.00 35 Briggs & Stratton $8.00 60 Industry Equipment LLC $ .60 2 Planter Worx LLC $ .60 6 Ruralmed Management Resources $1.00 30 Holmes, Ohio 5 $6.10 98 Sperry & Rice $.20 30 Walnut Creek Foods $1.70 13 Coblentz Distributing $1.50 13 Stitches USA $1.20 7 Keim Lumber Company $1.50 35 Pike, Ohio 4 $50.88 249 Rk Shares $17.00 75 R.K. Administrative Services $16.88 75 Vandalia Rural King Supply $17.00 75 Brew Brothers Trucking 24 Williams, Ohio 4 $35.35 529 Nostrum Laboratories $3.25 40 Axis Led Group $11.50 400 Toledo Tool and Die $16.00 70 Wassau Supply $4.60 19 Monroe, Ohio 3 $283.00 125 Virginia Ohio-West Excavating $3.00 60 American Heavy Plate Solutions $30.00 65 Energy Storage Ventures $250.00 Hill, Texas 3 $64.00 70 Johns Manville $40.00 50 Gibson & Barnes $23.00 L.B. Foster $1.00 20 Panola, Mississippi 3 $8.90 135 Greenserv $6.00 45 Cite Armored $2.9 30 Crown Cork & Seal 60 Source: Conway Projects Database106 JULY 2021 S I T E S EL E C T I O N A September 2020 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it this way: “Rural economies have the potential to create meaningful economic opportunities in the future, yet rural development needs to go beyond the notion of improving agricultural productivity; it must promote agricultural transformation that modernizes and commercializes agriculture, encourage investments in human capital in rural areas, and bolster private enterprise and investment.” Among rural economic developers contacted for this article, even the most successful resort to phrases such as “stop the bleeding” when they speak to the urgency of their mission, especially as it relates to stanching brain drain. Tillery isn’t alone in suggesting that parts of rural America are staring at some sort of reckoning, one that promised help from Washington cannot stave off. “You have got to have leaders step up,” says Danny Black, president and CEO of SouthernCarolina Alliance, which represents seven contiguous counties in the South Carolina Low Country fanning out north and west from Charleston. Hampton County, one of the Alliance’s seven members, scored one of the biggest rural projects of the year, a $314 million agricultural park on property the Alliance had procured for development. “Small town leaders are going to have to be able to convince folks that, ‘well, we might have to pay higher taxes to get some of these things done.’ I’ll talk to 50 people in any of these communities today,” Black tells Site Selection, “and all 50 will say the taxes are too high. But we have got to bite the bullet. We have got to invest and grow the population. If you don’t grow, you’ve got to move. That’s what these rural counties are having to do these days.” Phelps County is Funding Progress In 2015, 83% of Phelps County voters in Nebraska voted to raise their taxes to promote economic development. The resulting windfall, says Tillery, generates in the neighborhood of $500,000 a year. “We’ve used that money to acquire Next >