Workforce development and jobs training took center stage in the Massachusetts governor’s race Wednesday night as five of the candidates debate in a forum sponsored by SkillWorks and The Boston Foundation at Roxbury Community College.

NECN Business Editor Peter Howe moderated the forum, which included Democratic nominees Donald Berwick, Martha Coakley, and Steve Grossman and independents Evan Falchuk and Jeff McCormick. Republican nominee Charlie Baker declined to attend. SkillWorks focuses on improving private-sector and government efforts to help low-income and lower-skill workers, including immigrants and teens, get better-paying and more secure jobs.

Candidates generally agreed they would seek to find more money to support job-training partnerships and financial support for community colleges and vocational-technical high schools. Berwick endorsed earmarking 0.25 percent of state corporate tax receipts for workforce development programs specifically.

Coakley, the state attorney general, said she would look to increase partnerships between big companies like EMC and National Grid with local educational institutions to design education and training programs around the kinds of jobs those big employers are looking to fill. "We should continue as a good partner on the state level to align those businesses that are here that want to stay here and grow here with our two-year colleges and four-year colleges, both state and not-for-profit, because you know best what you need," Coakley told a small-business owner who asked the candidates how they’d improve alignment of job programs with employer needs.

Grossman bemoaned the plethora of unpaid internships for college graduates and said: "I'd like to create 5,000 paid internships for college students in Massachusetts, 50 percent paid for by the state, 50 percent paid for by the business community. I'm going to challenge the business community to step up to the plate."

Howe also asked all five candidates to talk about their first jobs, what they learned from them, and what their parents, schools and others had best done to prepare them for those jobs. McCormick talked about working manual-labor and construction jobs as mentors encouraged him to focus on going to college. Falchuk recalled opening a profitable school snack bar with friends. Coakley described working as a 50-cent-an-hour babysitter, "which gives you an idea of my age," and getting her first paycheck "with tax taken out of it" from Howard Johnson’s scooping ice cream. Grossman described starting in college as a salesman with his father’s Massachusetts Envelope Company and being reminded by his father that "I had two ears and one mouth, and I should use them in that proportion … and continually listening to customers got me better and better at understanding how to be a good salesman."

Berwick recalled working as a waiter at a resort in Connecticut and got the crowd of about 200 laughing as he described how physically and emotionally demanding the job could be. "Boy, was it hard," Berwick said. "I remember one lady who found her roast beef to be too well done and yelled at me. So I took it back to the chef -- who turned it over, added gravy and said: 'There. Rare!'"

With videographer Scott Wholley

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