Business owners often think of the workforce centers in Southern Colorado as employment agencies primarily serving job seekers. But the centers’ No. 1 goal is to help businesses attract the talent they need, and they offer other free services to assist businesses in retaining employees and support their growth and prosperity. With six workforce center offices between Colorado Springs and Trinidad and two more in La Junta and Lamar, the centers reach employers throughout the region.
“We are congressionally mandated and [mostly] federally funded,” says Traci Marques, executive director and CEO of the Pikes Peak Workforce Center. “By law, every county in the United States has to be associated with a workforce center.”
Colorado is divided into 10 workforce regions, overseen by the Colorado Workforce Development Council and an advisory board in each region composed of at least 51% business owners.
The Pikes Peak center covers El Paso and Teller counties, and 53 of the state’s 64 counties, including those in Southern Colorado, are part of a single region served by the Colorado Rural Workforce Consortium. A map at cdle.colorado.gov/jobs-training/workforce-centers shows the location of workforce centers throughout the state.
The centers provide eight core services, including:
- Labor market information: competitive wage analysis, trends and projections
- Retention strategies
- Skills-based and updated job descriptions
- Job fairs and hiring events
- A free statewide job database, Connecting Colorado, on which employers can list open job positions
- Business education — forums, round tables and workshops
- Training for new employees and upskilling current workforce through technical and/or financial support
- Connections to community resources including training opportunities and incentives.
“We meet people where they are, not where we think they should be,” Marques says. “We’re connectors, we’re conveners and we’re collaborators.”
The centers work with employers to attract staff through targeted and up-to-date job descriptions.
“Often, older job descriptions unintentionally have biased language,” says Becca Tonn, communications and public relations manager for the Pikes Peak Workforce Center.
“If they’re having trouble hiring, it could be because their job description is turning people away.”
Another important service is to help employers retain employees rather than having to lay them off.
“We’ll come in and consult with them, pull data and develop ideas: What skills does the staff have that are transferable to other open positions within the organization?” Marques says.
Some centers offer an incumbent worker a training program that allows employers to apply for funding to train workers in skills such as Excel, web design and certifications. Businesses accepted for these programs are reimbursed for the training, Marques says.
“Starting in 2025, we are going to offer workshops for businesses on different trends that we’re seeing,” she says. These workshops will cover topics such as tax incentives, skills-based hiring and job postings.
Pueblo is the flagship office of the Rural Workforce Consortium, the only one of the 10 districts that is state-run, says Director Suzie Miller. From offices there and in Cañon City and Trinidad, the consortium reaches out to smaller communities. It maintains partnerships with chambers of commerce, economic development sites and even service locations like a food bank in Rocky Ford to engage with businesses and job seekers.
“We also partner with our community colleges,” Miller says. The consortium has onsite locations at Morgan Community College in Fort Morgan, Lamar Community College, Adams State University in Alamosa and Trinidad State College, where it hosts hiring events and job fairs and brings in panels of employers to engage with students.
“That allows us to offer greater support through work-based learning models, where we might be able to address a gap in that skill and offset a portion of their wages while employees are onboarding them,” she says.
The centers also work closely with the state’s small business development centers, connecting entrepreneurs with partners offering business education and counseling.
“We served over 3,800 businesses in the last year,” Miller says. “We’re very mobile, and we want to create as much accessibility as possible for business customers to engage with us and receive the support they need.”
Besides consulting on skills-based hiring and job descriptions, “we might work with a business on job quality,” Miller says. “When you think about job quality, it’s often wages, but there’s so much more to consider that would make a business competitive and help with recruiting and retention. First and foremost, we’re looking to customize our approaches to these small businesses, helping them figure out what they need and find solutions.
“Whether you’re in Springfield or Craig or anywhere across the 51 counties, we’re really looking to provide high-quality services to ensure that economic vitality is on the rise in these areas,” Miller says.
