"We know it's important for us ... to get these young people before prospective employers," Mike Finney, CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp., said Monday at Gov. Rick Snyder's 2013 Economic Summit in Cobo Center here. "We're starting to scale that up. We've got to start facilitating the connectedness to make these things happen."

The effort, based on a pilot program that aims to connect qualified technical school graduates with open jobs, is an extension of the governor's efforts to boost job creation, lower an unemployment rate hovering around 9 percent and encourage the state's business community to take a leading role in spurring economic growth.
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In an interview, the governor said economic development is about more than extending "tax credits. It's about people helping people." And the traditional system for matching the supply of talent to demand in the private sector "is broken, and it's not just broken in Michigan. It's broken nationally."

In that, the relentlessly positive Snyder sees opportunity. There's opportunity to keep graduates of Michigan's colleges and universities at home; opportunity to attract talent from other states if Michigan can develop a program to connect talent to employment; and opportunity to leverage the promise of a recovering economy.

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