Georgia Quick Start - Training Magazine Article

slow to notice this trend. As training becomes a more important factor in business operations, states are finding that they can attract businesses -- and therefore jobs -- by using training as bait.

According to data compiled by Texas' Smart Jobs Fund Program, all but four states currently offer some kind of state-funded, industry-specific training programs. These programs entice a company to locate or expand its operations in a state by obligating the state to done one or both of two things: provide training programs for the company's workforce at little or no cost, or offer cash grants so the company can purchase training programs for its workers.

What kinds of training? The door is wide open, but a short list of common subjects includes data processing, customer service and quality improvement.

In undertaking a rough survey of states that use training programs purely to attract new companies (rather than to retain existing ones), we found that the phenomenon is especially prominent in the Southeast. "States in the Southeast are more accessible. I've met three governors personally," says Paul Kanzler, corporate training director for Grumman Aircraft Systems in Bethpage, NY, whose company opened a 90-employee sheet metal plant in Clarksburg, WV. Southeastern states, he says, "appreciate having industry in [their] locales more than the Northeast; the Northeast kind of took it for granted for a while. The other advantage is that there are not tremendous [government] bureaucracies in the Southeast. The Northeast and California, being larger are encumbered by their bigger bureaucracies."

Georgia's program, called Quick Start, also claims to be the best in the country. At least that's what its marketing director asserts. This assertion has objective supporters, however. A 1990 article in Fortune magazine that found Atlanta the third-best city for business in the country declared that Quick Start "can't be beat." And after studying various U.S. approaches to industrial development, Richard Howard, manager of industrial policy for the Canadian province of Ontario, said, "From our meetings in other states, we can report that Quick Start has a number of imitators, but none so well organized and effective."

Georgia's program may indeed be a model for the nation. It has at least two decades' seniority over most other states' program, having been in existence since 1967. Quick Start is completely financed by the state, and it offers a supporting network of technical institutes throughout the state. The tech schools are assigned as liaison schools to new companies based on their geographical locations.

Quick Start was probably the "fourth or fifth" most important factor in the decision by Holiday Inn Worldwide to move its international headquarters to Atlanta in 1992, according to Mark Caruso, vice president of worldwide human-resources development. Holiday Inn brought 300 employees from its previous headquarters in Memphis, TN, and hired 800 new ones in Atlanta. Quick Start people came in to analyze training needs before the move. After the move the state trained the new employees in desktop publishing, taught them 10 new software programs, and helped them create two professional-skills programs for customer-service people.

"While some states just hand you a pile of cash," Caruso says, "Georgia provides you with a training organization at your fingertips. They also have a liaison with [whatever] local technical school is in your county, so we actually had a three-way partnership between DeKalb Technical Institute and Quick Start and Holiday Inn Worldwide. Whatever Quick Start wanted to do for us that they couldn't themselves, they paid DeKalb to do."

SKILLED WORKERS
In 1991 the state of Texas, gathering research for its forthcoming Smart Jobs Fund Program, surveyed 350 CEOs around the nation. The results indicated that the group considered the availability of a skilled and trained work force as the most important factor by far in determining where a company would locate.

Quick Start's marketing director says his experience backs up that claim: "I have spoken with some companies who have come back to Georgia after an initial visit and informed us that other states had offered them a great deal of funding to purchase training. But they weren't interested in money. They were interested in the range of training services that Quick Start could provide."

One company that moved to Georgia as a result of Quick Start was Equifax, the world's largest information and credit-reporting company. "AT&T did a study for us of possible locations that would fit our needs," says Rosalynne Price, an internal human-relations consultant for Equifax. "If Georgia had not had Quick Start, it certainly would have been less attractive. We investigated putting our [main training center] in several other states, but none of them offered us a program anything like Quick Start." The state of Georgia developed a five-module course on customer service for Equifax, in addition to a program in assessing specific software programs and a course offering an overview of credit law. Quick Start even created a videotape that provided an overview of one of the primary jobs at the company.