In meeting with constituents, I’ve found widespread agreement that our top priority must be improving our economy and creating good-paying jobs to provide families a real future.

One of our Democratic leadership’s first steps was to create the Joint Select Committee on Maine’s Workforce and Economic Future. This bipartisan group of legislators spent months holding a series of public hearings and meeting with business leaders, education officials, and workforce experts.

From their efforts came LD 90, a first-of-its kind workforce bill to renew, and even reinvent, partnerships between government, education, workers, and businesses.

The workforce bill has many components. This week, I want to talk about two of the biggest: increasing access to education, and workforce development.

Improving Mainers’ educational attainment is one of the major goals of the workforce bill. In the next five years, Maine jobs requiring postsecondary education are expected to grow seven times faster than jobs for high school dropouts.

The workforce bill increases the capacity at Maine’s community college system by introducing four new degree programs for high-demand and high-wage industries, and increases funding to reduce waiting lists for 14 existing programs. This will allow Mainers to complete their degrees sooner, and in fields where they can find a good job.

To help employed workers improve their skill sets to qualify for better jobs, the workforce bill expands an existing worker training program. Also, for the 200,000 Mainers who started college but never finished, there is a new scholarship fund to help them complete their education.

The workforce bill also creates a plan to reconcile community college courses with those at University of Maine campuses, enabling seamless transfer of credits. That’s really important for students who start with an associate’s degree in mind, and discover they need a bachelor’s degree or more to pursue his or her true career interests.

Training outside of college is not left out of the equation either, as the workforce bill restores funding to the Maine Apprenticeship Program. This program helps provide on-the-job experience in industries varying from energy and telecommunications to construction and manufacturing.

These are not cure-alls for Maine’s economy and job prospects, but they are critically important steps in the right direction.

As we move forward there is still more we need to do, and we need to take a long view. Strengthening economic engines, retooling educational systems, fostering clusters of innovation, and realizing sustainable models of commerce, lifestyle and community will not happen overnight. These things require vision and forethought, and continual progress.

We are blessed in Lincoln County with institutions exemplary of sustainability, innovation, and jobs of the future, from our own Bigelow Labs to the University’s Darling Center, OceansWide, Biovation, and even FARMS, which I’m sure will play important parts in that vision.

But as a state we need to do more, and one of the best ways we can grow our high-tech and sustainably focused base is by encouraging investments in research and development as well as investments in sustainable local foods practices on our farms and in our fisheries. Hopefully the Legislature will give a boost to these efforts in the near future.

Maine can, and must, prepare for the future economy. I know that we have made some real progress this legislative session, and I’m looking forward to continuing this work.

Sen. Christopher Johnson lives in Somerville, and represents Maine Senate District 20.