ODESSA, Texas — University of Texas Permian Basin President Dr. Sandra Woodley met with the Odessa Development Corporation to give a presentation on how they plan on identifying key job positions that need to be filled within the Permian Basin.
Dr. Woodley knows that the Permian Basin is going to need more graduates to enter the workforce to keep up with economic demands.
“We know that over the coming decades, we're going to need more than 38,000 people with a baccalaureate degree just to keep up with the economic enterprises that are going on here in the Permian Basin," Dr. Woodley said. "So you know, I said it both excited me and kept me up at night, but we've got to step it up.”
This is why UTPB has laid out the groundworks of a plan to help fill in the gaps in the workforce.
The plan involves extensive research and data gathering to find out exactly what jobs need filling.
“To be able to take data very specifically to understand what our work force gaps are going to be over the next years," Dr. Woodley said. "How can we really understand at a granular level, how many accountants we're going to need, how many nurses, how many welders that we may need."
While the project is still in the talking phase, Dr. Woodley plans on spreading out their program to students not just at the college levels.
This way, they can hopefully influence students to pivot to more high-profile jobs in the future.
“Eventually, when this project gets off the ground, we want to connect that to the actual data of the number of students in which disciplines and all of the educational institutions here and then go even further back into the K-12 system to understand what is in our pipeline," Dr. Woodley said. "What are the students interested in? How do we navigate and encourage and incentivize students to choose these high paying high demand careers?”
Dr. Woodley said they will begin to have preliminary talks in April or May, then implement the plan during the summer.