GLOW With Your Hands looks to expand to healthcare

By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 16 March 2022 at 9:02 am

Workforce Development Board wants to highlight careers in health field

BATAVIA – The GLOW Workforce Development Board is looking to fill gaps in the healthcare field by highlighting jobs to local high schoolers.

Photos by Tom Rivers: Jay Lazarony is director of the GLOW Workforce Development Board.

GLOW already does a “GLOW With Your Hands” event for building trades. About 700 to 800 people from the four counties have attended those events at the Genesee County Fairgrounds.

Now the GLOW Workforce Development Board wants to have an event showing job prospects in healthcare businesses and organizations to high school students.

The Workforce Development Board will have a kickoff meeting on April 5 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Robert Morris Campus’s Multipurpose Room, 80 Union St. in Batavia.

GLOW wants to hear how to inspire youth from the four rural counties – Genesee, Livingston, Orleans and Wyoming – to pursue careers in healthcare.

The Workforce Development Board is open to other GLOW With Your Hands events to highlight other career clusters, said Jay Lazarony, director of the Workforce Development Board.

“We need the support of the business community or else it won’t work,” Lazarony said about the healthcare event.

With the building trades focus, businesses did demonstrations about the careers, from brick-laying, welding, electrical wiring, heavy equipment operations and other skills in construction.

Now, GLOW wants to expand that career exploration to healthcare where businesses are in need of workers.

“We have to engage them if we’re going to solve the skilled workforce gap – and we have to solve it,” Lazarony said last week during a discussion with Leadership Orleans.

Lazarony said the Workforce Development Board welcomes participation from Orleans County businesses in the GLOW With Your Hands events, for both healthcare and the building trades.

Healthcare businesses or officials interested in attending the kickoff meeting on April 5 are encouraged to RSVP with Lazarony by calling (585) 344-2042, ext. 4212.

Joe Lang, line supervisor for National Grid, shows Pavilion students how to set a switch with a pole during the first GLOW With Your Hands event on Sept. 24, 2019. National Grid representatives said the company offers many career opportunities as a line man, or jobs in administrative, metering and the service department.