Workforce Talent Development with Jordan Vogel

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 59 — Workforce Talent Development with Jordan Vogel
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Jordan Vogel
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.884 Brandon Burton
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
00:14.828 Brandon Burton
And now your host, he rarely misses a day of the gym, Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is episode 59 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm your host, Brandon Burton. It is my goal to help introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. Our guest today is Jordan Vogel. He's the Vice President of Talent Initiatives at at the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber in Ohio.
00:45.356 Brandon Burton
Jordan has an eclectic background, ranging from work as a professional classical musician to founding two small businesses and later bringing that entrepreneurial spirit to Sinterfuse. On the way, he made stops in corporate America, including serving as vice president of marketing for Berkshire Hathaway's Executive Jet Management, a private aviation company. In his current role as VP of Talent Initiatives with the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber, Jordan leads the chamber's effort to expand and diversify the talent base in a region through attracting new talent, developing and retaining existing talent, and connecting our their businesses to resources that drive growth. The goal to make Cincinnati the hottest city in America. Jordan is a member of the Northern Kentucky University Research Foundation Board of Directors, Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub Board of Directors, CPS Business Advisory Council, Inter Alliance Board of Directors and CVB Institute for Hospitality Board. Additionally, Jordan is a People's Liberty Hill Fellowship Mentor and a member of the Arts Wave Sustaining Impact Grant Committee. We're excited to have Jordan with us today to talk about workforce and talent development, since that's very much in his wheelhouse with what he does at the Cincinnati Chamber. And we'll dive right into this discussion as soon as we get back from hearing from our sponsor. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1 lowers your credit card processing fees at the chamber, 2 Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three provides recurring nondues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C for credit card. Again, Chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. Alright, Jordan, we are back. First of all, thank you for joining us today on ChamberThat Podcast. And if you would
03:11.8 Brandon Burton
Take a minute and say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:19.15 Jordan Vogel
Thank you, Brandon, and thank you for having me on the podcast. And hello, everybody. I think I I might riff on one of the things you mentioned in my bio, which was that I was, in fact, a classical musician, in fact, a classical flutist. And that was for most of my career. I've spent the last 15 years doing other things, but the first well let's see, I don't want to give away my age, but then again, I was I've been a musician for about twenty-eight of my years on this planet. And That included multiple performances at Carnegie Hall.
03:52.354 Brandon Burton
All right. That is awesome. Performing at Carnegie Hall multiple times. There's not a I think I'd imagine that list is pretty short of people that can say they've performed there and perform multiple times in Carnegie Hall.
04:03.66 Jordan Vogel
It was an honor to do it a and it was a really fun time in my life for sure. And that's actually where I grew up, by the way, which was New York City.
04:11.84 Brandon Burton
All right. Well, if you could take a minute and just share a little bit about the Cincinnati Chamber so we can all relate to kind of the perspective that you're coming from, kind of the size and I mean, we know where Cincinnati is, but just tell us a little bit more about the chamber so we know where you're coming from.
04:28.706 Jordan Vogel
Sure. it's a fairly large chamber as compared to to many of the other chambers in our region. Part of the reason behind that is because we're what's called a regional chamber. So there are about 55 chambers in the Cincinnati Metropolitan Statistical Area, referred to as the MSA. and We actually serve the entire MSA where many of our colleagues at other chambers are serving one specific area of a county or one county, whereas we're serving sixteen counties in actually three states. there are about sixty people on staff. And as you mentioned, we're located in Cincinnati, which is a wonderful city. Kind of just on the edge of the Midwest, but you know, a hub to many places in the world. In fact, supply chain logistics, because we're a hub, is one of our strong sectors. Amazon's hub is here, DHL's hub is here. Tons of just to give you an idea of revenue, we have a zero balance budget as many chambers do, but it it's somewhere around sixteen point five million dollar budget. And that's kind of a little bit about the chamber. May maybe to also stay kind of top level, give you a sense of what we focus on. We focus on three core things. And one is we what we call being a bold voice for business. That actually includes a lot of our legislative work or government affairs work. And it also includes being focused on infrastructure and getting people to work at the healthcare and education and all the cool things the city has to offer. the second pillar. Is what we call expanding and diversifying the talent base. That's this the pillar that I lead. and we can we'll be drilling down on that today. And that's there are three components to that, which we'll talk about. And then the last one, kind of a fancy kind of sentence that we use, and we say that we are leveraging the the power of the region's unique assets. And what that really means is we're both cheerleader for all the great stuff.
06:40.098 Jordan Vogel
that that the region offers, everything from our brewing community to our arts and culture scene, to our startup scene, to the business community, to the parks and rec, et cetera, et cetera, to creating some of those cool things. So Oktoberfest, some of you may have heard of it, it's actually the largest Oktoberfest outside of the one in Munich. Blink, which was a light projection mapping show that took place over four days and crossed our river here. hit many different neighborhoods. that's something we created. We have something called Taste of Cincinnati. So combination of cheerleading stuff that exists and then creating some of it ourselves to make sure that we're keeping the talent that we have, that they want to be part of a a wonderful, vibrant city. And so we create those experiences and making sure that everybody knows who who may not be living in our bit of dirt here that we've got great stuff to offer. So evangelizing all of it, if you will.
07:39.19 Brandon Burton
Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of good work to do there. Sounds like with being a regional chamber there in Cincinnati that that would be prone to a lot of strategic partnerships with some of the other chambers within that region and probably work towards some of these goals with them, if I'm right.
07:57.286 Jordan Vogel
You're 100% right. Actually, we've got a lot of terrific relationships, a lot of reciprocity, if you will, or dual membership situations. Yeah. there are all sorts of things that maybe opportunities you could call them that the region would face. So, as for instance, when we were going up for a bid on Amazon's second headquarters, we did that in combination with a number of other local chambers. And we are stronger together, as you can imagine, 'cause some are across our river, but they're part of our region. and we wanted to show that united front. So absolutely, we've got terrific relationships with many of our chambers.
08:35.646 Brandon Burton
Awesome. So as you were talking about the kind of the three pillars that the Cincinnati Chamber focuses on, you touched on talent base and I heard you your voice kind of spike. You know, there's some excitement there about the talent base and rightly so with that's what you're in the weeds with. So you'd mentioned that there's three pillars that you guys focus on with as far as the workforce development and talent there at the Cincinnati Chamber. You want to expand on what those three pillars are?
09:04.32 Jordan Vogel
Yes. So w within the talent bucket of work, there are three areas that we focus on. The first one is attracting new talent to the region. So people who are not here. We are actively going after folks that aren't here to hopefully convince them that this is a pa place they ought to think about moving to if they are in a mobile frame of mind. So if Someone is actually thinking about moving to another region, we want to make sure that Cincinnati is in the top choice set, if you will. so one example of of an effort along those lines is to go after what we call potential boomerangs. People that may have actually grown up here and moved away, or went to school here and moved away. These are people who had a sense of Cincinnati once upon a time, may even have ties, but don't necessarily have line of sight to how much. it has grown and how much more awesome it is today than it was when they were here. This is definitely a city on the rise with an upward and to the right trajectory. And we need to keep getting the word out that it's not the city that they remember. it's one of actually the the most in demand cities now in in the nation for all sorts of reasons. So we have a lot of programs focused on attracting talent to our city.
10:24.654 Brandon Burton
I like the idea of the boomerangs. And I haven't heard that term when as far as when it comes to attracting new talent, but that makes a lot of sense. If they're from Cincinnati or came to went to school there, they've experienced it. They know the goodness that Cincinnati has to offer and reach out to them and and bring them back. Now, what are some of the ways that you're able to find those boomerangs and to bring them back?
10:48.6 Jordan Vogel
So interestingly enough, LinkedIn has an alumni tool. it yeah, it's a really powerful tool, and and we mine that pretty heavily. we also have great relationships with our higher ed partners, and we've got a fair number. We've got over two dozen colleges and universities in our immediate region, with at least four of them being major institutions like Miami University, University of Cincinnati. Northern Kentucky University and Xavier University. So we have relationships with them where we're helping identify alumni or they're helping us identify alumni. and then we're trying to make sure that we're staying in touch and keeping the city top of mind with them and giving them that line of sight that I mentioned to all the things that have changed for the better since they've been here. So we do things like that. But we also actually the lowest of low hanging fruit, Brandon, it are our university students. These are people that are in our region for some period of time. And here's kind of the missilar that that we attack here, which is we need to retain that talent. And my position on that is we actually don't retain that talent at all. And here's what I mean by that. I'm being a little bit facetious, but that talent upon graduation, all the data show that they are at their most mobile upon graduation. So we're not retaining anybody. We are attracting them. We have to be in a constant state of attraction. So our work while they're here is to make sure that they have awareness of the opportunity that exists on the business side, because we know people will move or choose a place for the career opportunity first. And then very close second is the livability piece, the quality of life and the cost of living. And we make sure what we learned kind of the hard way is early on is that they actually had no awareness. You'd go into a classroom, you'd ask these students, so who here has heard of, you know, Over the Rhine, which is our hot and upcoming you know, kind of cool place to be, in downtown Cincinnati. And and they just they've never set foot. And so when we started to realize that that was the problem or part of the problem, we created events and ways to engage and connect with all that the city has to offer. So going after that talent that is here for the a brief period of time.
13:11.47 Jordan Vogel
is one of our strategies.
13:14.496 Brandon Burton
I love that. I mean, both between the the mining, the the LinkedIn alumni networks, but also just attracting the current students are already there. I mean, too bad you can't just give out free season tickets, you know, to the football games for all the alumni just stay here, be stay at Resident, you get, you know, free football tickets.
13:35.214 Jordan Vogel
So it's really funny you say that. Now we're not giving away free tickets, but one of our higher ed focused programs is one in which we introduce interns who are interning in our region. They're coming from many different colleges and universities, not just within Cincinnati, but many within it. and we do take them to either a Reds game or an FC Cincinnati game, which is a soccer club here in town, which is a big deal right now. So you you're you're not far off there in that when they especially for the FC Cincinnati games, the the grassroots excitement around those games is so intense and so exciting that it it really does most of the work for us that we've been we've done that, I believe at least the last one year, and and we may have done it the year before, and we'll be doing it again. So that actually helps a lot.
14:32.302 Brandon Burton
Well, you create of a fan out of and you they just never want to leave. So that's right. So as far as attracting the current student base, are there certain majors that you're looking at the based on the needs there in Cincinnati as far as workforce needs go? how are you figuring out who to target as far as the the current student base goes?
14:38.714 Jordan Vogel
That's right.
14:57.526 Jordan Vogel
Yeah, that's that's an important question. So we absolutely do focus on the type of talent that our businesses need the most, right? So obviously if if we're a chamber, our actual core mission, believe it or not, is to become the hottest city in America. But we do that through helping our businesses grow grow and thrive, or one of the ways, one of the core ways we do that. So that means we have to be paying attention. To what their needs are. And IT or technology is one of the top needs that emerged in our region. If you can imagine, even though you may not think of Cincinnati as a place that's home to maybe Apple or you know Google or Facebook or what have you, we are home to more Fortune 500s per capita than San Francisco, Chicago, or Dallas. And What's interesting about that is they all share a similar need. And by the way, we have a strong startup community. We have small businesses, mid-sized businesses, not for profits, government organizations, and then those big cos that I mentioned. And they all have the same need. And that is tech talent. So we've developed quite a few programs around that. And we do go heavily after that type of talent. we're a manufacturing talent, so that's important to us. Sub as I mentioned earlier, supply chain and logistics is a really growing area for us. shared business services, food and flavoring, actually financial services is gigantic for us. Hospitality, healthcare is off the charts for us. We have at least six major systems. So that is the type of talent we focus on almost, you know, more than anything else. But obviously we have needs for for all sorts of talent, but we do pay very close attention to The data and we did release a twenty twenty eight jobs outlook report and that data has given us pretty good insight into the types of job openings that will exist over the next eight years and where we're gonna have supply chain or not sorry, supply, talent supply potential shortage. So that's that's where we kind of focus our energies.
17:10.57 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. Well, it sounds like you definitely have a finger on the pulse as to what the needs are in the business community and being able to kind of narrow down who those students are and and attract that talent to the Cincinnati area. What are what's the next pillar that you look at when it comes to the talent base?
17:29.39 Jordan Vogel
So the next one is what we call develop, but actually that's really just our word for retain. so we we talked a little bit about attraction. By the way, there's there's literally dozens of programs there, but we don't have enough time for all of them. So the the develop bucket of work is really interesting because here's here's the conclusion we've come to. Our leadership programs, which are best in class by many different kinds of I guess benchmarks or measurements, if you will. They're they're really wonderful programs. Our leadership programs and our round tables are our talent retention tools. But here's how. We bake into them a bit of secret sauce. And our secret sauce is that we bake into the curriculum elements that connect the people who go through these programs to each other, but also to the community. So here's kind of the trifecta of how the leadership programs and round tables wind up being retention programs. The first thing is, is people are developing skills. Well, if you develop skills and you do well at your place of employee, you're probably going to be elevated. And if you're elevated, there's not a lot of reason why you'd leave, right? Because you're doing well and and upward mobility and all of that. The second thing is, is let's just say there's a ceiling. And the company you're working at is not a great fit for you anymore. If we're successful in connecting you to others by very deliberate means, you can work your network to land somewhere else in the region. Because I don't wake up worrying every day about whether or not someone's going to stay in a specific company. I worry every day about whether or not they're going to stay in the region. Because we know, again, speaking about data. The data shows that, you know, two, three, four, five years kind of is the average for a younger workforce. and that's just the data. I'm not gonna argue with the data. So I need to make sure that they're well connected and they can call up Bob or Julie and say, hey, you know, I've tapped out over here, or I'm about to tap out. what do you know? You know, what's going on at your place or another place, right? So that's number two. And the third thing is connecting them more deeply to the community.
19:51.36 Jordan Vogel
If people feel like they're making a difference in their community and they're tied to things that matter to them, this place becomes stickier. And we do this very deliberately through our programs. We introduce them to things we feel as leaders they ought to know about in the community. And then we give them paths to get more involved or pathways to get more involved. and so that's become a a pretty cool secret sauce, if you will, the way we've built our programs to to connect people to each other and the community.
20:23.168 Brandon Burton
I love it. I mean, those leadership programs and roundtables have extreme value. And I like how you said, you know, it's about creating an environment or an ecosystem that becomes sticky to keep them there. And I the question that came to my mind as you were talking about developing or retaining this existing talent is how do you go about attracting these people to, you know, from their busy schedules and work and family life and everything else they have going on to give some time and to be a part of a leadership program and a round table. How how are you bringing them in?
20:57.356 Jordan Vogel
Yeah, that's that's that's interesting. So we start to get into kind of the biz dev piece of all of this. I mean, we're fortunate. I I wasn't I hope I didn't come off as braggadocious in that these are truly best in class programs. and we do enjoy a certain amount of our reputation preceding us on these programs. But that doesn't mean that it's you know, easy peasy and we always fill the the classes with no effort whatsoever.
21:24.77 Brandon Burton
Does help though.
21:26.496 Jordan Vogel
it absolutely helps. It it we have a a an edge and an advantage and you know many many of our participants come to us you know passively if you will, like we don't have to do anything and and they're you know putting in an application. But having said that, we're a membership organization with nearly four thousand members. we div we foster, we nurture our relationships with people at our member organizations so that we have our ear to the ground on what they find valuable or will find valuable. Like what do they want us to build into the future leaders? How can we make sure that there's ROI and those relationships take the shape of them joining committees that are tied to our leadership programs, where they're helping us draft curriculum. they're involved in making the days run. So as a for instance, the number of our programs are basically 10 or so months a year, one day a month. It's a pretty darn big commitment for an organization to put somebody or let someone be away from work for that amount of time. And then the cost is is significant. These are four-figure programs. And so we make sure that they are engaged with us deeply and that We're serving their needs, they're relevant, that that we've got our finger on the pulse. And so we go to them and s and by the way, it kind of crosses into the diversity, equity, inclusion conversation. Like we will talk to them and say, hey, we've we you've been sending us terrific participants, but we noticed again this year four people. And honestly, there's not a lot of cultural diversity in the folks that you sent us. Would you be willing to take another look? And that's but we have such great. relationships with them that they listen to us and and it usually they'll say something like, my goodness, you're right. we didn't even realize that and we we'd like to you know do something about that. So it's part of the how do you get people in the class? It's just this close contact with them and making sure that we're fulfilling their needs and that that we're doing a good job of making a class that's interesting also for the participants.
23:45.518 Brandon Burton
That's right. And that actually that adds a nice rich layer to that dynamic too, to be able to have that diversity and be able to see from different perspectives of everybody else that that's participating. That's awesome. so what about the this third third bucket for talent development?
24:06.83 Jordan Vogel
So the third bucket, we call it connect. what it is is it's pipeline building. So to us at least, here here at the Cincinnati Chamber, we felt that we'd be remiss if we didn't grow our population. And there's a whole school of thought around you also can grow by not attriting. So that's the retention piece, right? And then the third piece is is well that that's all well and good, but then what about developing pipelines of talent, whether that's getting people who are underemployed or unemployed off the sidelines, or what about reskilling incumbent workers who might be in a job that that's not fulfilling for them or dead end or whatever. So we don't necessarily have to grow population as much and to fill those open jobs I mentioned. If we know that we have a glut in the market in one occupational role, and a dearth in another, why don't we develop a program that can reskill them into something we know has desperate need and away from something that's got more than it you know they could possibly use. So that's what and then the final thing on the pipeline building is and then what about the next generation? Just you know quite frankly, with the silver tsunami underway, meaning you know, all the people who are retiring out of workforce. We absolutely have to be thinking about our younger generation being introduced to the world of work. So we have two signature programs on the workforce solutions or pipeline building front under my body of work, and then another one under a workforce innovation center that we also have here, which I can explain in a second. But the first those two programs, one focuses on IT talent to hearken back to your other question earlier. Around do we you know focus on talent that we know is needed? Well, we sure do. And there's a program called Apprenti Cincinnati. And what it does is it takes people who have aptitude to have a career in IT, not pedigree, but aptitude. So they take an assessment and it puts them through a boot camp, which is free to them. The employer actually covers the cost. It's basically a sixteen thousand dollar value, free to the yeah, pretty pretty cool, free to the participant if they
26:29.398 Jordan Vogel
you know, pass the assessment, guaranteed job, and then the apprenticeships s begin after the boot camp for one year with an employer and it's a guaranteed job and then when they're done with that apprenticeship and these apprenticeships are registered with the state so they have real currency they come in at the middle skill level so we have Java developers cloud specialists dot net developers business analysts you know the list is is growing cybersecurity And we propped this up a little over a year ago and it's doing great. And the reason, by the way, that the aptitude versus pedigree is important is it also hits another important thing for us, which is the that diversity, equity, and inclusion piece. When you take two things off the table, one is did you grow up in tech? You know, and you know, if if so, then you're you're automatically a candidate. Well, a lot of people didn't have that opportunity. and they might even not be your typical tech type worker, right? So tech is a male, you know, white male dominated field. Well, with apprentice Cincinnati, because it's an assessment and it's blind resume that basically interviews where the employer doesn't get to see the person's name or anything like that. We've got an outsized flow of women, minority and veteran talent. So that program is really a special one for us because it hits so many different things. from DEI to tech talent to getting getting people who are on the sidelines off the sidelines. It's it's just a cool program. The other one is work-based learning. So these are high school seniors who we're getting to come straight into the world of work upon graduation because they've said that that's what they want. They've identified themselves as not wanting to go on for further school schooling at present. They want to earn a paycheck and they they're not interested in going into the military as well. So they do want to go into the world of employment, and then we have a program where we're putting them straight into that world for paid internships in their senior year with a holy grail metric of getting offered a job and accepting that offer. And that's been a fun program to prop up as well. We s we started that a little over a year ago as well, and we are now in four, actually almost five now school districts.
28:55.976 Jordan Vogel
in our region. And again, we're a regional chamber. There's about fifty five districts in our region. So lots of opportunity ahead.
29:03.702 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. So we've got the the three pillars, attract, develop, and connect. And before we we move too much further along, I wanted to just circle back around. I know we're getting a little short on time, but you had mentioned there's about a dozen other programs you have geared towards attracting new talent. I just want to make sure we're not leaving anything out. Is there any maybe one or two of those programs that you want to touch on real quickly, just so the listeners can kind of get a flavor of what Some of these other programs would be.
29:34.542 Jordan Vogel
Sure. be happy to. I I won't go too long because again, we we could be here all day, but I think so the higher ed strategy was was one. But then then there's the exporting the Cincinnati brand to places that we want to recruit from. and in particular, we've got to focus on culturally diverse talent. So for 2020, one of the cool programs we're gonna launch is around having an experience. available to people not in our region of Cincinnati and the people of Cincinnati in a very authentic and kind of real way, if you will, where it might be over the course of a couple or few days and everything from you know evening events or you know portable art installations, just engagements, what what you what our our partners are calling engagements, where we're giving them a taste and they're connecting with real life people and it ties to another program that we initiated here a yearish ago which is our Hello Sidsee ambassadors. So indeed it's a very kind of passionate group people who really love this region and want to help grow the population and they'll go and they'll tell their story and why they're here or moved here, why they moved here and just what makes it a great place to live for them. So well our ambassadors will be part of this And they'll tell their stories. And it is all about storytelling, you know, after all, isn't it? So having those experiences, connecting to those people, showing them what Cincinnati's all about. And by the way, you know, har hearkening back to that boomerang strategy, I really what we'd be doing is maybe we would do a little bit of research on w the alumni that are in a given geographic, not here. And then we say, hey, we reach out, we say, we're coming to town. We wanna have a par, you throw a party and tell you all about what's been going on in Cincy since you've left. And now you're combining two strategies. We're taking it to them, A, and we already know they've got some tie here, maybe even family, right, or friends. And that's kind of a one two punch. So those are a couple of interesting things that we'll be doing in twenty twenty.
31:54.188 Brandon Burton
That's cool. I like the idea of ex exporting the Cincinnati brand. Yeah.
31:58.414 Jordan Vogel
We we haven't I'm sorry, go ahead.
32:01.622 Brandon Burton
I was just saying that's great branding of how you how you phrase that.
32:06.136 Jordan Vogel
Yeah, and actually one of our great partners in the startup community at Centrifuse, which was one of the places I used to work, which is a basically a a startup organization focused on making Cincinnati a landing pad for entrepreneurs, basically to to be the the silicon valley, but you know the prairie version. they went to CES, the electronics. Yeah, exactly.
32:31.95 Brandon Burton
Yeah, unless.
32:34.366 Jordan Vogel
And they exported the brand for the first time ever to and they brought one of our Cincinnati startups who got some tremendous exposure. Hey Herbie. and it was really a cool way to tell the world, hey, Cincinnati's out there, it's really a terrific place to build a business and get funding and all of that. You ought to check it out if you're thinking about having a footprint in another region. So exporting that brand is gonna be big Big time important for us in twenty twenty and beyond.
33:08.086 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. So as we wrap things up here, I wanted to ask you, Jordan, if there's one piece of advice or action item that you could share with chamber professionals that are listening that based on our discussion today about talent development, what's something they can do to take their chamber up to the next level?
33:28.398 Jordan Vogel
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I actually I I might reverse the the the question a bit and say, I'll tell you what I wouldn't do. Okay. which is tied to what I would do. What I wouldn't do is try to boil the ocean. Yeah. And I say that because I understand that this space we play in that is basically, you know, talent and workforce solutions can be absolutely overwhelming. And there is a true war for talent out there. It's global. We're all facing it. No one's unique in this respect. And there's so many aspects to it that a lot of people try to do a lot of things. So my advice would be don't boil the ocean. But what I would do is I would try to pick however many initiatives you feel you have the bandwidth to pick that you have a reason to win in. And The reason oops sorry, the reason to win comes from the resources that you have, the partners, the existing passion, even the funding, that sort of thing, that you can leverage, that you can build upon. If you're just gonna get you know enter the frame because you hear a lot of people talking about apprenticeships, but you don't have a single company that's either ever done one or you know no one in the community there there's a a kind of a uphill battle to educate people on what it even is. I wouldn't start there. so I think that that's something and when I got here there were a million things I could have done on the workforce solutions front. But notice I only picked two big bets for our first couple years out of the gate. One was deep pipeline building so that was the high school kids and the other was only on tech talent. Now I got a lot of flack, you know, so people, why not manufacturing? Why not healthcare? Why not this, why not that? I'll get to it. I gotta start somewhere. And the proof of concept for tech was it cut across all of our members, and we already had some reasons to win because we have a startup community that leverages tech. We have all of these big codes that actually have mature tech talent in them. We have a lot of training partners. The list is long of how we could actually leverage
35:30.188 Brandon Burton
Gotta start somewhere.
35:51.862 Jordan Vogel
that particular initiative or the resources available to that initiative. Whereas there are other things where I'd be just starting from scratch and it wouldn't make sense and it just would would have been an uphill slog.
36:04.108 Brandon Burton
That's right. So this next question, final question I have for you is something I ask everyone that I have on the show is as we look to the futures of chamber chambers of commerce, how do you see their purpose going forward?
36:19.806 Jordan Vogel
so one of the things I'm very proud of of of our chamber and our leader, Jill Meyer, our CEO, is we have absolutely planted a flag in the ground to lead our region. So we're not just doing things for our members, we're doing things for our entire community. And I think being willing to be the tip of the spear for positive change in your community is important. It's it's a role that in fact chambers are somewhat uniquely qualified to to play, and I'll tell you why. Chambers have superpowers. And the superpowers that you typically have are the ability to convene and the ability to connect and the ability ability to be an amplifier and a megaphone for the things that are important to your region. And you have the trust of your business community. And so to take those superpowers and leverage them to be that tip of the spear for positive change, if not Chambers honestly, then who?
37:29.377 Brandon Burton
Yeah. Good good point. Good point. I need to get some capes as we're all superheroes. Now that that's very very well taken point though. The chamber does have a way to amplify and and really does have superpowers that nobody else can really touch. So that's that's important. Well, Jordan, I wanna thank you for spending time with us today on ChamberTap Podcast. If somebody listening wanted to connect with you or had questions about what you had to share, wanted to continue this discussion kind of offline, what would be the best way for for someone to reach out to you?
38:07.618 Jordan Vogel
Yeah, easy the easiest way is email for me. J Vogel. So J V O G E L at Cincinnati Chamber dot com. J Vogel at Cincinnati Chamber dot com. My much preferred method of connecting. not voicemail, gets very but definitely and I'm pretty pretty quick on the on the the email. So yeah, please feel free and Yeah, I I it'd be my pleasure to connect with any of your listeners.
38:38.868 Brandon Burton
Awesome. Well, I appreciate what you brought to the show today. I think you put out some good ideas and opened minds probably even as to different ways to for chambers to use their superpowers to attract and retain talent and to build that workforce in their community. So thank you for for sharing that and for being with us today.
39:01.422 Jordan Vogel
Well, thank you, Brandon. It was my pleasure and I appreciated the opportunity to talk to you and your audience.
39:06.966 Brandon Burton
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