In one of his acts as governor, Jack Markell announced that a new Talent Exchange has been developed to assist dislocated workers in their search for new employment opportunities.
The Talent Exchange creates a profile based on the in-demand skills that employers are looking for and matches those skills to relevant jobs. Developed with the assistance of a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, the Talent Exchange also uses resources from across multiple state agencies.
The Talent Exchange will be open for all citizens via a user-friendly website, but the development was spurred by the announcement last year that the DuPont Company would be downsizing following a merger with Dow Chemical. About 1,700 positions were eliminated.
“We are always trying to do more to assist our citizens in new and innovative ways,” said Markell. “After the announcement last year that DuPont would be restructuring, we felt it was time to take a hard look at these resources, and determine ways to improve the user experience and enhance our ability to be successful in finding job placements. We feel very good about the results, and now hope our citizens utilize them and discover all of the new ways they can help.”
The exchange was developed with the help of the private sector human resources consulting firm Aon Hewitt, a company that specializes in helping to reposition talent and maximizing job placement success.
“We’ve seen a lot of news about government response to corporate actions, and most interventions are about retaining the jobs rather than creating new jobs” commented Paul Rubenstein, a senior managing Partner at Aon Hewitt. “Delaware is innovating in a way that embraces change. Nobody else is doing this. The Delaware Talent Exchange gives the state new ways to respond. It builds a consumer-quality experience for impacted citizens, goes beyond job titles, gets at the ‘talent’ within all of us, and creates the ability to work across State agencies like the Department of Labor and the Economic Development Office in new ways. The exchange allows us to get data about people that we do not typically get; we are using that data to connect people to opportunities they wouldn’t have considered previously.”
The new site will enhance the capabilities of the Delaware Department of Labor to serve dislocated workers, and also allow for easier collaboration between that department and other state agencies.
“The Talent Exchange is a great new resource for our toolbox,” said Secretary of Labor Patrice Gilliam-Johnson. “It will enhance our ability to assist an individual by broadening their search, supplementing our existing services like one-on-one counseling and resume building, and will also allow us to identify new opportunities for retraining. These resources all come together to maximize the chances of us quickly finding new opportunities right here in Delaware for dislocated workers.”
One of the new features of the Talent Exchange will also be the ability for other agencies to access data in real time, showing skill profiles for those who have utilized the exchange. This will enable agencies like the Economic Development Office to market available talent to companies directly, and back that marketing up with hard data.
“The Talent Exchange will allow us to see on demand what skills may be available for placement in new job opportunities,” said Bernice Whaley, director of the Delaware Economic Development Office.“That will not only allow us to more rapidly respond to inquiries from businesses looking to hire, but will also allow us to actively market these skills to companies inside and outside of Delaware.”
The Talent Exchange Portal can be accessed at talentexchange.delaware.gov.
