Young talent a high priority at Mackinac conference

by Sven Gustafson | Michigan Business Review
Thursday May 28, 2009, 6:20 AM
Christianne Sims

Young talent will feature prominently during this year's Mackinac Policy Conference after a year when the economic hurricane threatened to wash the issue off the regional agenda altogether.

Conference organizers expect more than 70 so-called young professionals from Detroit and other regions to mix and mingle during the four-day conference on Mackinac Island, which ends May 30, up from 65 last year. The conference for the second straight year wraps up Saturday with a session track designed specifically for the demographic.
Research increasingly suggests that members of the so-called Millennial generation, born roughly between 1977 and the mid-1990s, are key indicators of a region's economic health. Many experts suggest Michigan is losing out as more and more of its best and brightest pull up stakes and relocate out-of-state after graduating college.

Participants in the 2008 Mackinac conference ranked as their top priority for action doing more to retain and attract young talent.

"We've been playing around with this notion of whether it's the job or the place that comes first" in attracting Millennials, said Christianne Sims, director of the Detroit Regional Chamber's Fusion group for young professionals.

"We have to showcase both at the same time in order for us to start competing on the national level."

But while the jobs picture certainly hasn't helped bolster the case for Detroit or Michigan as a whole, much of the rest of the country has joined the state in losing jobs. Lou Glazer, president of the Michigan Future Inc. think tank, pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal story that said young people continue to flock to Portland, Ore. despite high unemployment.

Glazer published a report last summer that found that young professionals in Michigan aren't nearly as concentrated in urban metropolitan areas as they are in Illinois and Minnesota, the two Great Lakes states with the highest per-capita incomes.

"If you look back to the '95-2000 period, when Michigan had a really strong economy, we still had the third-highest out-migration of college graduates," Glazer said. "So both (jobs and place) are hurting us."

In the past year, Fusion members have launched a "Breakfast with CEOs" series for members and a Web site to help employers in Michigan find interns from colleges and universities. Much work remains to highlight opportunities in non-automotive sectors such as film, health care or alternative energy, Sims said.

"It kind of goes along with that whole car-jobs mentality with, what else is there in Detroit and specifically, what we need to do to help make this a more attractive place from the outside beyond a lot of these other politics that have been going on and have... plagued us from a media image for so long," Sims said.
Jeanette Pierce
At Inside Detroit, a nonprofit that promotes the city and region through bus and walking tours and events, things have been "extremely, insanely, off-the-hook busy," co-founder Jeanette Pierce said.

The group recently has helped showcase the city for internship and young-talent programs for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and it organized 12-hour bus tours to help promote the region for the U.S. Army's TACOM division in Warren.

"I'm seeing a still kind of a disconnect between the powers that be, if you will, and the grassroots, what I call the do-ers," Pierce said. "But it is getting better."
Keith Zendler
While the economy has taken much of the focus off young professionals in favor of hanging onto jobs, community development groups are more active than before in improving quality of life issues, said Keith Zendler, CEO of PeopleMovers.com, a social networking startup site in Detroit.

"Business as usual hasn't been getting it done," Zendler said. "Since the last conference, this whole economic crisis has forced businesses and leaders to get outside the box and think differently about what's important.

"I do see an accelerated movement toward building a strong community."

Contact reporter Sven Gustafson at (734) 302-1732 or sveng@mbusinessreview.com. Or follow him at www.twitter.com/sveng.