This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Julie Huls, CEO of Waymaker Group. We chat about economic development strategies for mid-sized cities, the impacts of the pandemic on regional thinking and what a future of mega-regions means for cities trying to attract talent.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: What has the pandemic done to this discussion?
Julie Huls: Oh my goodness. Turned it on its head. Economic development will never be the same. Technology-based economic development was not even a thing before COVID. We are now really having to hustle when we think about workforce development, not just policy, but implementation. We have a number of our middle-tier cities, to your point, that are getting really smart and really proactive about building workforce development training centers that will meet the needs – be they … incoming and [in] the future [or] even technology training needs of our industry partners, right?
We are in the middle. I can’t say middle. We’re just starting the process, this massive and multi-decade process of re-shoring, ideally, everything from biopharmaceutical manufacturing to semiconductor manufacturing, and that process is obviously not going to be overnight. And so there is a lot of work. There’s a lot of work to do. And I don’t know that economic development will ever be the same. And that’s okay. It just means that we are opening our minds to thinking more broadly about things like access and workforce development and education, etc. This topic and COVID touched every aspect of our lives.
Jeff Wood: Yeah, and I’m always interested in just the idea of people — it’s mostly white collar workers, to be honest — but people being able to go and move other places and live other places and support a different economy than maybe the one that already has maybe all the riches. And so that’s an interesting kind of thought, too. There’s still only a small percentage of people that can actually do that, but they can have a great size impact on the places that they go.
Julie Huls: No question. I think it’s so much more common, as one example, to have a number of jobs, right? It used to be obviously that we would clock in and clock out very locally. We would have one occupation and the more we are out there, the more mobile, and truly mobile, I think a lot of our professionals have become as a result of covid. You’ll see one individual one white collar worker, juggling three or four different occupations at any one time, which is something we didn’t see before.
Jeff Wood: That’s interesting because over the pandemic, I saw people get in trouble for that, right? For working two different jobs for getting the same salary at both jobs. But, they could — I guess they could do it because they’re not under the supervision or they didn’t have to go into an office or something like that. And so you can work for a transit agency in Chicago and Seattle at the same time, and nobody would be the wiser.
Julie Huls: Nobody would ever know. Yeah. I think, Employers are starting to wise up to some of the strategies, but I think, generally speaking, a lot of employers just understand that at the very least, they’re going to be other demands. I think COVID also just taught us that it can’t be all about work all the time. I think we’ve reprioritized family life and balancing our lives, which is nice.
Jeff Wood: How much does climate change and kind of the energy investment space play into all this? We have all these new industries that are just, like, growing in these places where you maybe didn’t expect them — the “Battery Belt,” as they call it now, Southeast and the former Rust Belt, places like Atlanta and Georgia, where they’re building Rivian cars and stuff like that. I’m curious what that has done to the discussions that you have with midsize cities about what economic development can be. And these industries about climate change, which, they are very divisive sometimes in terms of politics.
Julie Huls: I’ll tackle the latter one first. Climate is something we haven’t started talking about in economic development… Maybe we’ve started the conversation. I would love to see us advance the conversation a lot faster than we are. I think there is no question that the impacts of climate change, clearly, they’re already impacting geography. They’re impacting the decisions that are important. The decisions that employers are making in terms of where to or where not to expand. And scientific talent is making decisions based on climate impact and we are not as proactive as a country as I would prefer to be, and I worry that part of that is because we do have so many other transformations that we’re in the middle of managing and navigating, right? As a society, as it relates to energy, I will tell you, I never anticipated, and I’m actually really proud of, our middle American cities and our middle-tier markets embracing brand new technologies — and not just that new concepts and ways to create and invent around energy solutions. I, again, was born and raised on a farm in central Illinois, close actually to the University of Illinois. And, that agricultural-driven culture is pretty traditional and there’s some cultural values, right, that don’t always involve being super open to change or super open to technology. And the speed with which a lot of our middle tier cities have embraced new technologies, battery technologies, semiconductor technologies. We’re having conversations now with folks in the middle of us about quantum technologies.
We’re still trying to define what that means, but I’ve been delighted. I don’t know if that means that COVID really did have such a horribly severe impact that we’ve been forced to open our minds. I don’t know that it matters, but I have to give folks in the middle U.S. big props for being open to new solutions and new speeds. Technology does not move at the same speed as agriculture or manufacturing, and so we’re making a lot of adjustments in these middle tier cities.
