Nobody here is being told their skill is obsolete. They are being told it applies to something else now, and that is harder.

Lansing is in the middle of a transition that has not resolved, and the way it is usually discussed gets the human part wrong.

General Motors remains one of the city’s largest employers with around four thousand workers in Lansing and nearby Delta Township. Grand River Assembly runs a single shift building Cadillac performance sedans and stamping metal for other models. A large federal grant was awarded to shift Lansing production toward electric vehicles, GM has been publicly noncommittal about the timing, and the company exited the Ultium battery joint venture and will not staff the Lansing battery plant directly even as production there continues. Meanwhile Sparrow, this region’s largest health employer since 1912 with roughly seventy six hundred people, is now University of Michigan Health-Sparrow, with new facilities recently approved.

So the major institutions in this city have changed hands, changed products, or changed plans in a short span, and the people inside them have been asked to absorb that without a clear answer about what happens next.

Here is what most retraining conversations miss. The research is actually encouraging on the numbers. University of Michigan researchers studying plants that moved to full electric production found assembly employment rose rather than collapsed, and at one long-running plant the workers needed per vehicle stayed substantially higher than expected. The predicted mass job loss has not shown up in the data.

The real obstacle is not headcount. It is whether a fifty one year old who has built the same thing well for twenty two years believes they can still learn something new. That is not a skills gap, it is a belief gap, and no apprenticeship funding touches it. A person who has quietly decided they are too far along to start over will not enroll in the training, will not raise their hand, and will not tell you that is why. Changing that belief is the entire job of the leader standing in front of them, and it happens to be exactly what this session is about.

Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and has keynoted state association conferences in eleven states, including LeadingAge Illinois and health care associations in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and Colorado. His book, You Are Capable of More, is built on this specific question.

Lansing employers asking people to change.

Healthcare is where Chris operates, but the question of whether people believe they can adapt runs across this whole economy.

Lansing events Chris speaks at.

Booking a keynote speaker in Lansing