The Inclusive Change

Table of Contents

• Describing What is Required to Make Programs and Services in the Public Workforce Development Ecosystem More Effective
• Where Workforce Programs Fall Behind in Inclusive Change
• Why More Donors Should Lead
• What Donors Must Change
• References

Describing What is Required to Make Programs and Services in the Public Workforce Development Ecosystem More Effective

Workforce Development Boards (WDBs) create and manage partnerships to co-implement education, training, career pipelines, and other programs. These programs directly address employers’ needs for inclusive change in qualified talent, contribute to economic growth, and make adult learning, networking, and career readiness activities accessible to the public.

In addition, investments, grants, and donations from the government, foundations, and corporate donors reduce economic barriers to program participation and promote greater employer engagement.

Training activities and career pipelines, in particular, have resulted in new jobs and family-sustaining wages. Donors have noted these results in success stories and hope the impact achieved in local households will be replicated to foster broader economic growth and development. However, these successes obscure the state of workforce development partnerships, diversity and inclusive change, retention rates and readiness for the future of work. 

These states or conditions represent unresolved and persistent deficits, which suggest WDBs are not as effective as they could or should be. Therefore, it is crucial to explore where workforce programs fall behind, why more donors should lead, and what donors must change.

Where Workforce Programs Fall Behind in Inclusive Change

The Investing in America’s Workforce Volume 3 report released by the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) notes that WDBs struggle to resolve the negative impact of resource constraints. They also approach competitive funding mechanisms and differences in organizational culture with limited engagement and sustain fewer external partnerships than complex public service programs typically necessitate. In addition, the report noted that WDBs have been more successful in cooperation for the development of referral pipelines than the Inclusive Change creation of complementary or cohesive interagency activities embedded with a shared vision and operating mode.

As a consequence, WDBs rely upon a more limited network, miss key opportunities to share or decrease risks, and are more reactive than proactive to the demands driven by the future of work. While it is clear all stakeholder groups should be engaged in improving this circumstance, WDBs are held to the highest standard because they receive, allocate, and distribute public funds. WDBs also become signatories to compliance-oriented preconditions, manage subawards and conduct performance monitoring. This positionality indicates that the path to achieving a more significant impact for participants in workforce programs begins with internal change. Thus, workforce leaders should not be focused on Inclusive Change externally while looking for a change solution. 

NASWA certainly highlights key practices in WDBs for which change should be made. However, the report is less emphatic relative to gender, racial, geographic, ability, and age diversity at the partnership level. Therefore, the social, cultural, and economic benefits derived from “partnership diversity” are understated and disconnected from unresolved issues such as low recruitment and Inclusive Change retention in workforce programs. Thus, the status, performance, and representation of diverse leaders in workforce partnerships are obscured.

Critically, the potential relationship between partnership diversity and change solutions is less visible in this context and as a result, corresponding performance measurements and evaluation may seem counterintuitive. Yet, they are a necessity. For example, WDBs could engage potential partners with minimal consideration for diversity and inclusion matters and few connections that represent broad community knowledge or foster broad community resilience. Conversely, if donors situate the needs, concerns, and interests of community members as the center of workforce activities, they may require more representation and express concern that partnership diversity of Inclusive Change has been deemphasized. Therefore, centering community interests in workforce activities causes us to question what change should look like, where it will be led, and by whom.

Why More Donors Should Lead

In many ways, the workforce development field is a context in which workforce leaders have become resigned. For instance, in interviews, meetings, and conferences, many workforce leaders confided that low recruitment and retention in training programs have resulted from job-seekers who have yet to reply to phone calls, complete registration, or persist in training sessions. Workforce leaders also Inclusive Change has argued low-performing public schools, economic disinvestment, and poor infrastructure have caused many jobseekers to enter WDBs indecisive and unprepared to make career-related decisions.

In addition, workforce leaders described issues that complicated the operational environment, such as restricted, decreased, and competitive funding streams. These funding streams have been a disincentive to external strategic partnerships, and leaders lamented stakeholders’ expectations that they simultaneously increase resources, decipher empirical datasets, and deliver labor intelligence for Inclusive Change . Efforts to establish training programs with industry-recognized credentials and stay abreast of evolving federal training and employment guidance have been necessary, although they have added further to these responsibilities. 

Workforce leaders also conceded that arduous compliance tasks limit the time WDBs have available to resolve any other needs. For example, WDBs often engage large employers and industry associations. Theoretically, this strategy maximizes their resources, providing access to the greatest number of potential partners and vacancies for their career pipelines. Indeed, workforce teams are understaffed, and leaders appreciate ways to save time or financial resources. However, this Inclusive Change outreach strategy also reduces the time and financial resources allocated to minority industry associations, networks, small businesses, and diverse providers that may have been more appealing to historically underrepresented and marginalized jobseekers.

Further, workforce leaders talked extensively about the time saved via economic forecasts, labor estimates, and trends analysis. They utilized this data to reveal growth industries and high or in-demand skills. Leaders established work plans for training programs accordingly and, through performance reporting, documented the corresponding knowledge or skills gained. However, their reporting has been less concerned with the alignment between training activities, career pipelines, and the needs and interests of enrolled jobseekers. 

For instance, learners’ aspirations for training and career pipelines in music, entertainment, sports, creative arts, dance, or gaming may be unrelated to the interests of the largest employers and employment data from the latest economic reports. Therefore, WDBs may steer job-seekers away from their interests in order to pursue opportunities in demand, including healthcare, financial services, education, construction, and manufacturing. Furthermore, the training sessions workforce leaders described seem primarily lecture-driven, and they struggled to demonstrate the accessibility of resources such as customized digital learning, differentiated learning opportunities, and access to a peer network. Therefore, the purpose, subject, and value of workforce training appear predetermined as program participants and partners are recruited to fit the mold.

Time and cost-savings notwithstanding, this mold does not center on the needs and concerns of adult learners and jobseekers. For example, workforce leaders claimed the operating environment was further complicated by narrow employer commitments to hiring and making necessities, including affordable health benefits and family-sustaining compensation, accessible in underserved communities. 

This complex environment seemed to justify their external focus on change solutions and, admittedly, temper their aims for performance at the program level. Their focus, for instance, was on employers increasing staff and remuneration rates. However, workforce leaders expressed little interest in adjusting internal outreach strategies and diverting resources to identify alternate employers who share their values. In fact, through performance reporting, workforce leaders seem to misrecognize their education and training partners as inputs in a broader set of programs and compliance requirements. Workforce programs are regimented and impersonal in this context, although, like any other form of education, they are a social process.

To underscore this social process and incentivize retention, workforce leaders were asked to increase the number of diverse coaches, alumni, faith leaders, recruiters, and other success models; arrange events where participants and success models can connect; and collect data relative to the outcomes they produce. Unpersuaded, most program managers balked at the task and adamantly decried, “Donors don’t require it.” 

What Donors Must Change

WDBs feature economic trends and labor intelligence in program proposals and reports to highlight regional expertise, appeal to employers and fulfill donors’ compliance tasks. However, WDBs often omit details that describe how the career interests of the job-seekers enrolled in training programs were determined and how these programs were made relevant to their learning styles and abilities. This is a key workforce gap because job-seekers represented in labor intelligence data may not reflect the racial, gender, age, and abilities of the jobseekers who eventually participate in workforce training. In addition, their caregiving responsibilities, financial resources and career aspirations may be different and unexpected. Thus, their interest in and fit for any workforce program should not be assumed.

Moreover, WDBs provide scant evidence relative to the performance of diverse and strategic external partnerships. Thus, the social networks, trust relationships and representative success models to which participants in workforce programs have access are obscured. As a result, underrepresented groups could have been recognized in proposals and reports predominantly as unskilled aid recipients. In this instance, they would receive less regard for their capacities as small business owners, employers, industry leaders, alumni and workforce development partners. Further, workforce leaders frequently set aside related issues such as low recruitment and retention, look externally for change solutions, and await external results. These are all tendencies that WDBs and their leaders have the capacity to resolve voluntarily, yet their preference is to delay change until required.

Donors should therefore lead by redesigning compliance requirements and reporting templates for WDBs as a key change solution. Donors should further require the delivery of greater narrative content and descriptions of gaps, challenges, and corresponding resolutions relative to revised outreach strategies, partnerships with diverse private sector stakeholders, and the interests and abilities of enrolled jobseekers. Donors should also require narrative reporting about the coaches, alumni networks, cohorts, events, and digital resources, which reflect a social process of education, multi-channel communication, and customized, differentiated learning. 

In addition, external reviewers should be hired to conduct a comparative content analysis to assess the coherence of information between proposals, cooperative agreements, and compliance reports. They should observe a selection of outreach, engagement, and training activities. External reviewers should also attend workforce conferences and events, document best practices and lessons learned, and report the degree to which WDBs incorporate lessons learned in training programs and career pipelines. 

The reports from external reviewers should verify resolutions to workforce gaps and inform resource allocations for each program under any current or future funding mechanism. To increase the impact of these resolutions, donors should promote and incentivize engagement between WDBs and organizations that have international influence. Examples could include the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD), International Labour Organization (ILO), and Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict). Engagement with organizations such as these would expose WDBs to a greater number of best practices, help them identify a wider range of digital tools, and connect these tools to the learning styles and abilities of enrolled job-seekers.

Though these recommendations are not all-inclusive, they represent a way to make the changes necessitated by workforce gaps operational. With the advent of new compliance requirements and external review, they can ensure the workforce development ecosystem becomes simultaneously more effective and inclusive.

References

The Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs. (n.d.). Home—G3ict. Retrieved February 14, 2024, from https://g3ict.org/

International Labour Organization. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved February 14, 2024, from https://www.ilo.org/global/lang–en/index.htm

National Association of State Workforce Agencies. (n.d.). NASWA Reports. Retrieved February 14, 2024, from https://www.naswa.org/naswa-reports

UN PRPD. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved February 14, 2024, from https://unprpd.org/

U.S. Department of Labor. WIOA Performance Reporting. Retrieved February 14, 2024, from http://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/performance/reporting

U.S. Department of Labor. (n.d.). WIOA Success Stories. Retrieved February 14, 2024, from https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/performance/wioa-stories