Manufacturing is alive and well in Seattle, and our commitment to building and keeping jobs in the region is just as strong. I was pleased to share these messages and to represent our 51,000 students at the launch of the Mayor’s Seattle Jobs Plan on Aug. 24 at Cascade Designs in South Seattle. This is an example of a business that is adapting to the current economic climate and taking advantage of the region’s unique strengths and vision.

It was great to see that students from the Seattle Job’s initiative welding class at South’s campus were also invited to take part in the news conference. At the Seattle Community Colleges, we are focusing on jobs for the future, because the jobs that will get us out of the recession are not the jobs we lost going into it. Welding is a good example because it’s responding to the new “green” focus and requires more technical skills. Today’s graduates need to be more highly skilled than in past generations.

According to the Center on Education and the Workforce, we can expect more than a million job vacancies across the state in the next eight years — and two-thirds of those jobs will require post-secondary credentials. Mayor McGinn also brought up the fact that students who complete one year of college, along with a workforce credential, get started on a lifetime pathway of higher earnings and higher education.

The Seattle Community Colleges are committed to doubling the number of students who complete a college degree or certificate that will get them into a good job that pays family wages. The Mayor’s Jobs Plan will convene industry, education, philanthropic and community leaders to forge a partnership and commit $2 million to help achieve this goal.

We are excited about the opportunity to work with these partners to provide the support services, career advising and job placement assistance that our residents need. The partnership will also allow us to reengineer classroom instruction by integrating remedial math and communication skills directly into professional and technical programs to reduce the time it takes a student to complete a program and improve the percentage of students who complete.

This key partnership will also allow us to better connect education and training programs to actual industry demand for skilled workers so we can ensure that a lack of skilled workers does not create a bottleneck in the recovery.

The event is outlined in this news release from the Mayor’s office and was widely covered by news media.

Photos: Welding students and faculty from South Seattle Community College with Mayor McGinn and me at the announcement of Seattle Jobs Plan.