A Conversation With ... Jaydean Miller

What’s the purpose of the Missouri Career Center and your role in its operations?
We provide workforce development services to the masses. Our job is to help people learn how to job search appropriately and move on to a career or improve themselves in a way that they can get a better career. We don’t just serve the unemployed, though people (on unemployment) are required to come here once every 28 days to do a check-in. Anyone can use our services, and they’re free. I oversee what’s called our welcome team. That (includes) the customer service desk, from getting people started and getting them enrolled to doing an initial assessment and making sure people are aware of the services and what we do here. I oversee the switchboard operator as well.

Tell us about the people served by the Missouri Career Center.
Lots of folks come in who may be looking for a different job, or they want a different part-time job. The variety of people we see is what astounds me, from people who have no work experience to people who have worked 40 years in the same field and then they get laid off or something like that. Then you have the variety of people with very low skills to people with master’s level degrees or higher, even, who come in and use our services (to) job search and take our workshops or classes. We see about 500 people a day.

How would you classify hiring activity right now?
There are hundreds of jobs, good jobs, and a great variety of jobs. I’m definitely seeing more jobs. We have 900 on our system right now, and I can remember a time just a couple of years ago, when we were down to about 200. I’m seeing more people get hired, but we are still seeing 500 people in here a day. They’re not all unemployed, but they may be looking for different work.

Which industries are hiring now?
According to our latest (Real Time Labor Market) study in July from (Missouri Economic Research & Information Center), health care agencies are big, transportation is big in our area, hotels, anything service related, and hospitality. It even tells us that the “now” occupations are truck driver, retail and customer service. Mercy and CoxHealth are two top employers right now that are hiring. And I tell people, with health care being the biggest, don’t think of health care as you’re going to have to be a phlebotomist or a nurse. There are also accounting jobs, janitorial jobs and training jobs, and just because it’s the health care industry doesn’t mean you’re going to have to put on a mask and rubber gloves.

Unemployment in the Springfield metropolitan statistical area is at 6.7 percent. That’s down from a year ago, but it means people are still looking for work. With 900 job listings, what’s keeping people out of the workforce?
Some people are going back to school while they’re unemployed. (For others, it starts) with what kinds of jobs (they are) applying for. Folks sometimes are really just shooting themselves in the foot because they’re just sending out applications like rapid gunfire rather than concentrating on something that’s going to really fit them or be a good fit for the employer as well. I think sometimes, people need to come in so we can talk to them about what expectations they have and what they’re putting out there. Then, we have folks who don’t really want to work, who get on unemployment, and think, “You know what? For a while, I’m going to collect this unemployment check.” They’ll spend six to eight months on unemployment, doing their check-ins, but not looking at one job in our system. They tell us they’re using the newspaper or just going around putting in applications, but they’re not using our system. We provide help, but I always say you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. They need to update their skills. They need to be motivated. And we want to work with them one-on-one.