GSETA

The Future of Federal Workforce Development Policy

On December 12, the Brookings Institute hosted a discussion on the future of federal workforce development policy in the context of long-term joblessness, slow labor market recovery, and a fragile middle class. Moderated by Fellow Elisabeth Jacobs, a panel of experts examined current federal policy, promising proposals for updating existing policy to meet current labor market challenges, and political obstacles preventing progress toward a system that best meets the needs of both workers and employers. 

You can view the recorded panel discussion here or by clicking on the video above. 

WIBs and One Stops on YouTube

Increasingly, many WIBs and One Stops are turning to YouTube to sell their services to job seekers and employers.

In most cases (as you'll see in the examples below), these videos highlight programs and services. But YouTube could also be used to provide educational video, such as how to complete an online application or how to address particular interview questions. You can also create your own YouTube channel, which allows you to create Playlists of videos created by others on YouTube that might be useful to your business or job seeker customers. 

Here are a few examples of how WIBs are using YouTube to communicate their messages. 

Suburban Hennepin and Carver County WIB--Job Seeker Services

 

 

Suburban Hennepin and Carver County WIB--Business Services

City of Los Angeles WIB

 

Tri-County WIB

The Future of Work: Learning that Never Ends

A recent New York Times piece takes a look at how constant learning has become the new norm at work:

The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers, well beyond the information technology business. Car mechanics, librarians, doctors, Hollywood special effects designers — virtually everyone whose job is touched by computing — are being forced to find new, more efficient ways to learn as retooling becomes increasingly important not just to change careers, but simply to stay competitive on their chosen path.

Going back to school for months or years is not realistic for many workers, who are often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will make them more valuable, or just keep them from obsolescence. In their quest to occupy a useful niche, they are turning to bite-size instructional videos, peer-to-peer forums and virtual college courses.

Informal learning--learning from peers and through peer networks--as well as mobile learning are increasingly becoming more important than classroom training, in part because so many occupations are evolving so rapidly, traditional schools can't keep up. 

As the article points out, there's also a need for workers to not only train to stay relevant, but for them to actually anticipate what new skills will be needed in the future. Occupations are no longer static. Skill requirements can change within a matter of months as companies look to retain their competitive advantage in any way they can. 

All of this means that workers need new career management skills, including the ability to direct their own learning and to assess the market and anticipate what new skills will be needed where. They also need to be able to tap into networks of peers for learning, as much of what they need to know is happening in peer-to-peer forums. 

How are we preparing workers for this change in the market? What information do they need and what resources do we need to share with them? 

The Hollowing Out: How Technology is Contributing to Unemployment

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, and Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for Digital Business take on the issue of America's disappearing middle jobs:

Since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 G.D.P., equipment investment, and total corporate profits have rebounded, and are now at their all-time highs. The employment ratio, meanwhile, has only shrunk and is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s when women had not yet entered the workforce in significant numbers. So current labor force woes are not because the economy isn’t growing, and they’re not because companies aren’t making money or spending money on equipment. They’re because these trends have become increasingly decoupled from hiring — from needing more human workers. As computers race ahead, acquiring more and more skills in pattern matching, communication, perception, and so on, I expect that this decoupling will continue, and maybe even accelerate.

Their main argument here is that technology can now do things previously thought to be purely human capabilities. For example, Google recently released the news that they have a fleet of computer-operated Prius's that have driven over 1,000 miles with no human intervention. Once perfected, how might this technology impact jobs in trucking and transportation?  

For those who suggest that we've seen technology disrupt labor markets before, McAfee responds:

All previous waves of automation affected only a small subset of human skills and abilities. To oversimplify a bit, the industrial revolution was about building machines that had (much) more brute strength than we did. For all mental work, the industrial revolution was meaningless — you still needed people.

Until recently, the digital revolution also didn’t affect that many human skills and abilities. Computers became better at math, and at some clerical abilities, but we people were still miles ahead in other areas. So employers needed to hire humans if they wanted to listen to people speak and respond to them, write a report, pattern-match across a large and diverse body of information, and do all the other things that modern knowledge workers do.

Employers also needed people if they wanted lots of physical tasks done, including driving a truck or vacuuming a floor. The same with most tasks involving sensory perception, such as determining if a soccer ball has crossed a goal line.

All of the above abilities have now been demonstrated by digital technologies, and not just in the lab, but in the real world. So employers are going to switch from human labor to digital labor to execute tasks like those above. In fact, they’re already doing so. I expect this process of switchingto accelerate in the future, perhaps rapidly, because computers get cheaper all the time, are very accurate and reliable once they’re programmed properly, and don’t demand overtime, benefits, or health care.

For more on the trend and a list of 19 proposals for working with our technology, check out this follow-up article. 

Two More Reports on Workforce System Reform

Looks like reform is in the air! Last week we shared a report from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers that raised a number of system reform issues. Now here are two more reports on reforms to the system, both of which suggest focusing on human capital development:

• Let's Get Serious About Our Nation's Human Capital: A Plan to Reform the US Workforce Training System--From the Center for American Progress, the report lays out a plan to create a Workforce Investment Bank and a Career Navigation system, consolidating funding from multiple federal departments and creating regional WIBs.

• One Stop Career Centers Must be Reinvented to Meet Today's Labor Market Realities--The Corporation for a Skilled Workforce weighs in on reform, supporting a move to more integrated work and learning, a focus on brokering resources and more distributed service delivery.

 

The State of the US Workforce System

Kathy Krepcio and Michele Martin have written a Research Report for the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University,"The State of the U.S. Workforce System: A Time for Incremental Realignment or Serious Reform?". The paper aims to spark conversations among workforce development leaders at the federal, state and local levels to re-imagine a workforce system that is more effective in a fundamentally different economy than the one that existed when WIA was enacted in 1998. 

The authors examine 5 trends and the challenges that the workforce system is facing as a result of these trends. The trends include:

• The slow growth economy and jobless recoveries, which creates longer periods of unemployment for more workers.

• Changing labor markets and employment relations, including the growth of contract/contingent workers and the impact of globalization and technology on occupational requirements. 

• Advances in information and communications technology and their impact on both jobs and service expectations. 

• Demographic changes in the workforce.

• Reduced workforce system funding. 

The paper then looks at how the workforce system may need to adapt and change its definitions of value to succeed in this new economic landscape. 

An Introduction to Content Curation for WIBs and One Stops

Content Curation for Nonprofits

View more presentations from Beth Kanter

In an age of information overload, one of the most valuable services WIBs and One Stop Career Centers can provide to their job seeker and employer customers is to become outstanding "content curators." There is simply too much information online for people to weed through and organizations that are able to effectively find, select and repackage relevant, high quality information will be positioning themselves well. 

What is Content Curation? 

According to Beth Kanter, one of the finest nonprofit content curators on the planet, content curation is the "finding, organizing, filtering and 'making sense sense of' information on the web and sharing the very best of that content with your network." Content curators are editors of sorts, looking for the best information and resources to benefit their various stakeholders. 

Why Be A Content Curator? 

Content curation is first and foremost a valuable service--you help your customers make sense of the constant stream of content that comes at them. This can be particularly valuable for job seekers, who may be overwhelmed by all that they find online related to the various facets of job search. 

As a content curator, you also have an opportunity to establish your organization as a thought leader in specialized niches and effective content curation can be one of the best ways to get attention from employers, who also drown in a sea of information. 

As Fast Company points out, content curators are the "new superheroes of the web." 

How to Be a Content Curator

Content curation first requires you to be clear about the audiences you are curating for and the kinds of information and articles they need. Clearly job seekers are looking for great job search content, but this can be further segmented into job search strategies for different industries or occupations.Employers will be interested in information that helps them run their businesses more effectively, find talent, and save or make money. It may be worth your time to survey your stakeholders to learn more about the kinds of information that most interests them. 

Once you're clear about your audiences, then you need to begin engaging in the three "S's" of content curation, as described in the graphic below. 

Finding great content is only part of the job. You also have to provide some annotation or commentary to help people make sense of the information you are providing. You also need to set up various strategies for sharing the information you find. Social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, etc.) are particularly useful tools for sharing. You can also share via email and email newsletters, depending on your audience. 

Resources for Content Curation

To get the most from your content curation strategy, check out these additional resources:

• Beth Kanter's Content Curation Primer--a great place to start your content curation journey. 
• Best Practices for Content Curation--a nice presentation on content curation tactics and strategies.
• How to Be a Formidable Content Curator--in 17 pretty easy steps. One of the best pieces of advice here is to "own a niche." 
• 30+ Content Curation Tools--many of these tools are free and they can make your content curation job much easier. 

New Study Identifies Cost-Effective Changes to Local Workforce Training Programs to Improve Outcomes of Individual Training Accounts

According to findings from a new study, job seekers in the United States could realize potential net benefits over 20 years of approximately $41,000 per eligible person if local workforce training agencies implemented training programs that combine higher, more flexible individual limits for expenditures on state-approved training with support from training counselors.

The study, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, is the first long-term evaluation of the relative effects of alternative training models used under the Workforce Investment Act. It examines three models for delivering workforce training services through locally provided individual training accounts (ITAs): Guided Choice, Structured Choice, and Maximum Choice. The study shows that moving away from the status quo to provide more flexible, higher-value training awards, as provided in the Structured Choice model, is cost effective and has large, positive impacts on the long-term earnings of ITA job seekers.

Key findings from the study include:

• Switching to larger, more flexible ITA training awards with counseling could generate $46,000 per ITA job seeker in net social benefits, driven by large, sustained increases in earnings. 

• Individual ITA job seekers who receive larger, more flexible training awards and counseling could earn an additional $41,000 through retirement age. 

• The government could save $5,000 per ITA job seeker by switching to higher-value, more flexible ITA awards as a result of increase tax payments. 

• Compared to the status quo, ITA job seekers selected training that was better matched to jobs within their chosen occupation under a Structured Choice model, which provided greater training funds with counseling. The study's findings demonstrate that this model makes ITA job seekers more likely to complete training, to earn a credential or degree in the field of training and to be employed in the occupation in which they trained. 

1 in 2 New Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed

The recession has been hitting young people particularly hard. According to the AP: 

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.

Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.

In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.

So college grads are pushing high school grads and dropouts out of opportunities and the situation doesn't look like it will be getting better anytime soon, as most jobs are being created in low-wage, low-skill sectors that can't be easily outsourced or done by computers. The question is, how do we respond to this? 

The View from the Cliff: Program Funding in a Precarious Financial World

Bridgespan recently posted a report on the financial outlook for nonprofits that receive government funding and the outlook, to no one's surprise, is not good. Since One Stop Career Centers and Workforce Investment Boards operate largely on funds from federal, state and (sometimes) local government, this report may offer some lessons for workforce development too. 

Fortunately, there are two articles that offer some ideas for addressing the issue of shrinking funding. The first, Five Ways to Navigate the Fiscal Crisis, suggests:

• Getting to strategic clarity
• Diversifying fundings streams
• Improving productivity
• Finding ways to better measure outcomes
• Moving beyond "vendorism"

Ten Nonprofit Funding Models may offer some additional strategies for thinking through funding possibilities for WIBS and One Stops. While the "Public Provider" model is clearly the one currently in use by the workforce development system, it may be worth having conversations with Board members and community members about how the other models might be adapted or utilized for diversifying funding opportunities for local areas. 

It's clear that as funding for programs shrinks we are going to need to have different conversations about alternative resources to serve our job seeker and employer customers. What conversations are you having locally and otherwise? How can we learn from each other?