Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today to talk about Career and Technical Education Month. The month of February has been set aside as Career and Technical Education Month. It is an opportunity for us to talk about something that is working very well in some of our States and is giving our young people amazing opportunities, and it should be expanded. Over the last 6 years, my home State of Ohio has come a long way. We have turned a record deficit into a billion-dollar rainy day fund. We have created lots of new jobs, but we also have a problem in Ohio and around the country, and that is a skills gap. If you go on the www.ohiomeansjobs.com Web site right now, I think you will see about 122,000 jobs being offered. In other words, these are companies saying: We are looking for people. At the same time, in Ohio today, we have about 280,000 people who are out of work. So how could that be, you ask? Well, if you look at the jobs and you look at what the descriptions are, many are jobs that require skills, and some of these skills are not available right now in the workforce. So you could get a lot of people put back to work just by developing these skills in Ohio. At the same time, this is happening around the country, and this skills gap--this mismatch between the skills that are in demand in a local economy and the skills of a worker--is something that can be dealt with with more aggressive career and technical education. Businesses want to invest more.…”