Jaime Benavides, a mortgage officer at Able Financial Services in Cranston, talks with a client about refinancing her mortgage. When he arrived in the United States, he took English classes and worked in a Providence jewelry factory. He later cleaned houses and delivered newspapers, before getting his financing job.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

Jaime Benavides was a college-educated computer programmer in Colombia before moving to the U.S. six years ago. It has taken time to work himself back into a white-collar job. He works at Able Financial Services in Cranston.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

The demographic makeup of Rhode Island is changing, and employers are trying to figure out what the change will mean for them.

Part of a larger national trend, the number of foreign-born Rhode Islanders, as well as the number of Rhode Islanders who speak English as a second language, is approaching a level not seen since the early decades of the last century. The majority of this growth, according to numbers provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, is the result of the rapidly increasing number of Rhode Islanders who come from Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas or descend from families from these countries.

The state has seen this group, often referred to as Hispanics or Latinos, grow by more than 24 percent in the last five years. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Latinos in Rhode Island quadrupled, jumping to about 9 percent of the state’s population. Among the host of business issues that have grown out of this historic immigration are language barriers, documentation problems and questions of skill transfer between countries.

Tied to these issues is poverty, which, according to some Latino leaders, pervades this immigrant community because of the barriers between Rhode Island businesses and Rhode Island Latinos.

To address these matters, the Providence-based Center For Hispanic Policy and Advocacy held the Latino Workforce Development Conference last week, inviting employers, government and nonprofit groups, as well as interested individuals, to discuss efforts to help Latinos adjust to working in Rhode Island and to help businesses adjust to the needs of this growing population.

“People don’t know who the Latino work force is,” Miguel Sanchez-Hartwein, executive director of CHisPA, said in an interview. “When they think about the Latino work force they think undocumented, they think unskilled. What we are trying to do is show the community that if we can understand who the Latino work force is we can help develop them to their fullest potential . . . [and] we can develop the Rhode Island work force.”

As Sanchez-Hartwein explained, one of the biggest misconceptions regarding the Latino work force is that it is easily definable. Latinos, he said, come from a variety of countries and backgrounds throughout Latin America, and the problems they face are as varied as the differences between countries such as Colombia and the Dominican Republic.

While immigrants from Mexico are faced with one set of immigration issues, those who come from Puerto Rico, a United States territory with commonwealth status, are American citizens. Some immigrants from Latin American countries arrive with little education and few marketable skills, while others are highly educated, with skills that are in high demand by Rhode Island employers. But many skilled immigrants cannot find work because they don’t speak English or don’t know how to transfer their degrees or training certificates to their U.S. equivalents.

Understanding these varied differences, Sanchez-Hartwein said, and developing methods and policies that address them are only possible through dialogue, which he said he hoped the conference would spur.

One example of the complicated experience that Latino immigrants face is that of Jaime Benavides, originally from Colombia, who has lived in Providence for six years.

Benavides is a trained computer programmer with a five-year degree from a Colombian university. For seven years he worked as a computer engineer with the Colombian Ministry of Health. But economic and political problems in his home country, he said, led him and his wife to move to the United States. It was a decision, he said, that paradoxically lead him to earn more money than he had ever made in Colombia, while at the same time working jobs that did not use his education.

“The problem was that I didn’t speak English,” Benavides said. “For those of us who come to the United States and don’t speak English, they don’t care if you are doctor, accountant, programmer. You cannot do what you were doing before.”

When he got to Rhode Island he quickly enrolled in English classes and began looking for a job. His first years in the country found him working in a Providence jewelry factory, and later cleaning houses and delivering newspapers. When applying for jobs, he first began including his programming education when filling out applications, but quickly stopped.

“My supervisors said you don’t need it to clean houses,” he said. “It’s not important for that job, they said, so I don’t use it.”

As his English improved and his connections in Rhode Island grew, Benavides found a job as a mortgage broker, working with the firm’s Spanish-speaking customers.

Workers such as Benavides present an interesting problem to a state like Rhode Island that is desperate to develop a more skilled and educated work force. Adelita S. Orefice, director of the state Department of Labor and Training, said the state and employers must figure out creative means of using the skills of Rhode Islanders such as Benavides by solving the problems that keep skilled workers from using their skills.

“If this group of immigrants coming in are skilled and have the training we need, we have to organize ourselves so that we can take advantage of those skills,” Orefice said. “If we have to have people step back and be underemployed, that is an enormous waste of the resources available to us…. There are reasons why employers are paying attention to this. We have vacant positions right now because we don’t have enough people with the skills necessary to fill those positions.”

But helping immigrants find better jobs is not only important for employers; it’s also of vital importance to the Latino community, according to Sanchez-Hartwein. Some of the poorest communities in the United States are found in Rhode Island’s Latino neighborhoods, according to U.S. Census figures. “Poverty and economic development are linked,” he said. “If you can solve issues of education and give people access to jobs that will lead to a career, you can start addressing issues of poverty.”

One of the goals Sanchez-Hartwein said he hoped to achieve through the conference was to highlight the best practices of some Rhode Island employers. Among those employers is Lifespan Hospital Group, with 11,000 employees, the largest private employer in the state.

Lifespan has a number of programs to help groups improve access to job and career opportunities at hospitals and clinics. Among these programs are free English classes for Lifespan employees, as well as skill-improvement classes in Spanish and Portuguese.

The hospital group also has partnerships with organizations such as Dorcas Place, which help people who have degrees or certificates from other countries get the equivalent American version. Doing so would allow a doctor or nurse from Mexico, for example, to work here in Rhode Island.

In addition, Lifespan said that for employees faced with immigration problems, the company will now pay for a consultation with an immigration lawyer. Why is it going to these lengths? “We have labor forecasts coming back to us that show labor shortages getting worse and worse and worse,” said Brandon Melton, Lifespan’s senior vice president for human resources. “We have tremendous needs in terms of building a skilled and diverse labor force, our vacancy rates are getting worse, and the demographics are working against us. It’s in our company’s best interest to do this, and so it’s really that simple.”

Melton said that for a health-care company to be successful, it’s very important for its employees to be representative of its patient population. At Bradley Hospital, according to Melton, 27 percent of young patients are children of color. At Rhode Island Hospital, 25 percent of all patients are people of color.

“We want our employees to be culturally competent,” he said.

Moving in that direction means building a labor force that reflects the demographic changes of the state, he explained. Whether that means helping recent immigrants transfer their skills so they can work in the state, or it means training them in new skills, including English, bridging that gap is vitally important.

“What we have to do,” Melton said, “is do a better job of reach- ing out to these communities.”