The City of Kingston is reaching out to employers and residents to refresh their community-wide strategy to recruit and retain workers. 

Kingston's Workforce Development and In-Migration Strategy was first implemented in 2017. City of Kingston Workforce Development Analyst, Dajana Turkovic says while some of the issues are the same, the pandemic brought new challenges for employers and job seekers including: mental health, child care and remote work. Turkovic says she hopes to hear from the community to gain context on the issues they are facing and to see which themes emerge.

"The whole purpose of this strategy is to figure out common pain points in the community across sectors and how we can work together to find strategies to address these pain points."

There is an online information session for the initiative on June 2nd, along with an interactive forum on the Get Involved Kingston website where both employers and job seekers can share ideas and participate in discussions.

"You're not going to have success as a community if employers can't hire...It's hard for employers to hire if job seekers aren't happy and they're leaving the community.  Our goal is to make sure we provide as much support as we can to both employers and job seekers...What you ideally want to do is bring people here and keep them here, if people are happy in their job they're much more likely to stay in our community."

Turkovic added she really encourages the Queens student community to get involved as they are the future of the workforce.

Listen to the full CFRC interview with Dajana Turkovic below: