Modernizing Workforce Development for a Healthy and Inclusive Economy
“We’re begging for people,” Pete Yonkman, President of Cook Medical, tells me. “Globally we have five hundred open positions. Here more than one hundred people are in line waiting for a job.” Cook manufactures sophisticated medical devices in the US and around the world. I am speaking with Yonkman after having toured the company’s newest facility on the northeast side of Indianapolis – a community stressed by poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment.
The facility reads ultra-modern and architecturally elegant with white walls, black metal framed windows and a cleanroom that looks like a cross between a server farm and an operating room. A mural depicting two gloved hands assembling a catheter greets visitors in the entryway. Says the artist of her composition, “When people enter this space, they know where they are. It brings in that pride. The building is built for them, for those workers, for the neighborhood, and to bring jobs to them.”
Cook’s partnership with Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana and the local community breaks new ground. Cook owns and equips the facility. Goodwill hires, employs and manages the staff. Goodwill also provides coaching, mental and physical health services, substance abuse disorder counseling, housing stabilization, and other support services. For employees, sixty percent of whom have been involved with the justice system, the plant’s mid/upper-skill jobs come with an expectation of long-term employment and career development.
At a time when millions of people languish at the margins of the workforce despite nearly two open positions for every unemployed job seeker, Cook and Goodwill open a window into what could be. By tapping into talent employers too often ignore, the partnership benefits both the company and the community. Yet until we revamp this country’s antiquated approach to workforce development, Cook’s Indianapolis plant will remain just one of a handful of bright spots in a labor market and economy out of synch.
Why this confounding paradox? Because in most cities and states, fragmented workforce development efforts do not function as a cohesive system. They focus largely on employment, less on mobility and even less on the pre-employment skills that are a necessary first step for those who, for reasons of bias, exposure to trauma, lack of access, or structural barriers are poorly prepared by the K-12 pipeline.
While notable exceptions exist, only rarely is workforce development addressed regionally and delivered collaboratively. Too often, we approach workforce issues as they were thirty years ago with dozens of overlapping, poorly coordinated, federal, state, and local programs laboring under thousands of pages of rules that limit discretion. Further confounding the problem, poor coordination across employers, training organizations, educators, and nonprofits cause adult learners to face serious obstacles in securing the logistical and other supports they need to sustain program participation and completion.
The journey that landed me in Pete Yonkman’s office began when my colleagues and I sold the fintech company we led. I’d spent a decade and a half in consulting and finance. After transitioning from the private to the social sector, I spent the next fifteen years at one of the nation’s largest nonprofits. Those years gave me an abiding belief in the sector’s capacity for good as well as a dispiriting sense that too often it underperforms its promise. My efforts to close the gap between performance and promise led me to apply business principles to nonprofit management. Subsequently, as a Harvard ALI fellow, I began to explore ways in which cross-sector collaboration can be used to combat the grand challenges that bedevil us. Later, using collaboration as a lens, I focused in on workforce development. Then as now, I was troubled by the contradictions embedded in the US economy, particularly the degree to which the system works for some but not for others.
Beginning in 2019 and continuing through 2021, my research partner and I set out to identify policies and programs that have proven effective at training individuals and expanding the talent pool essential to economic growth. We interviewed hundreds of workforce experts in the public, private and social sectors. We spoke to the staff and leaders of nonprofit organizations, educators, funders, government officials, employers; and we spoke with current and aspiring workers, participants in, and graduates of, the programs and initiatives that were included in our investigation.
From our interviews we developed ten principles for building a more equitable workforce development system. The first two principles relate to the people the system is designed to serve; the next four, to the attributes of high performing programs; and the last four, to changes necessary to produce outcomes at scale. Taken together, these principles suggest reforms (summarized below) to regional workforce development practices at the worker, program, and systems level. Local leaders committed to producing opportunity and inclusive regional growth fueled by a robust talent pipeline would do well to adopt them.
Worker/Individual Level Reforms: The workforce system must be grounded in the diverse needs of the populations it serves. This requires both a more precise and a more expansive definition of individuals’ skilling needs.
Talent development requirements vary widely by economic region, a function of what employers need now or anticipate needing in the future, the skills aspiring workers have, the supply of training and education available from local institutions, and the demographics of the labor force. Bureau of Labor Statistics data alone are insufficient. They must be augmented by real time labor market analytics to help leaders compare the know-how necessary to support local economic growth with the competencies that exist in the population. This allows occupational training and educational providers to tailor their content more precisely to regional needs.
Relying solely on occupational skill development, however, excludes millions of prospective workers. Acquiring marketable qualifications does not always begin with talent development that’s specific to an industry. Often the path to a good job starts elsewhere. For some aspiring workers the process begins with executive function coaching; for others, with career readiness training. Organizations like Roca, Inc. and New Moms use cognitive behavioral theory and executive function coaching to help young adults overcome the adverse impact of acute stress that makes participation in conventional training and education programs challenging. Stressors like scarcity, bias, trauma, and exposure to violence make it difficult to concentrate, prioritize, follow instructions, and self-regulate. Yet these are the very qualities people need to find and hold a job.
Consequently, leaders must broaden their definition of required skilling needs and think more expansively about the types of organizations and services they need to include in a workforce development system. In addition to community colleges and occupational training programs, fully functional workforce systems must include organizations like drug rehab, re-entry and other entities that help participants “build the muscle” to “show up” for education and training. Our research gave me the chance to interview remarkable people doing remarkable work. Molly Baldwin, founder and CEO of Roca, drove home the need for thinking more broadly. She said, “We are trying to help young people stay alive...These young people aren’t going to go to a job…a training program…a really cool entrepreneurial project…What’s really clear to us is they can’t; they aren’t ready.”
Program/Organizational Reforms: Adult learners face daily challenges that affect program participation and completion. To support them, workforce systems must provide more and better access to wraparound services and resources that help mitigate the personal and financial constraints that make training and education difficult to sustain.
Today, Iris is a nurse. She drives her daughter to school in the car she owns. She owns a refrigerator. She sees opportunities for career advancement she never thought she’d have. Before completing an exemplary program run by Wesley Community Center, Iris lived with her daughter in a homeless shelter in Houston. Every day she watched her daughter board the school bus in front of the shelter. It pained her to know that her daughter went to school hungry and that she spoke with friends about not having a refrigerator. Iris was able to complete the technical education that thanks to wraparound services, support, and coaching from Wesley, led her into a living wage job. For Iris and many other adult learners, occupational training alone is not enough.
Surveys of aspiring workers suggest that many doubt their ability to meet personal and family obligations while enrolled in training or education. Building the right resources into a program’s design increases pipeline throughput. This includes both direct supports like transportation vouchers, stipends, tuition reimbursement, as well as personal, career, and financial coaching. It also includes referrals to wraparound service providers for mental health services, childcare, housing, healthcare, and so on.
In addition to wraparound services, many of the aspiring workers with whom we spoke lack access to employers and income. Earn and learn opportunities such as internships, apprenticeships, sectoral initiatives, and employer-generated project work create bridges to employment, and they do so while people are engaged in training and education. As with support services, learn and earn opportunities require partnerships across organizations, agencies, and sectors.
System Level Reforms: No single institution or sector can meet all the requirements necessary to produce economic mobility at scale. An effective workforce system – one that advances inclusive economic growth – requires coordinated cross-sector action built on a platform of skills and transparency.
To overcome the fragmentation that impedes most regional workforce efforts, local leaders must convince stakeholders to collaborate even though they may compete for employees, students, even funding. Elected officials have a responsibility to use their voice and their influence to call the community together. Committed sponsors, well-defined initial agreements, a clear outcome agenda, shared accountability systems, and a common skills taxonomy facilitate collaboration.
Regional stakeholders must also rethink how they hire and promote if they hope to address the inequities that plague workforce development today. Relying exclusively on degrees rather than skills aggravates longstanding biases and unnecessarily narrows the pool of candidates from whom to choose. It also fails to recognize the short- and long-term benefits associated with up/reskilling current employees.
Once convened, multi-sector partners operate most efficiently when they use the same nomenclature to describe required skills and when they are supported by a trusted intermediary or backbone organization. The backbone organization should maintain a common data platform, facilitate information exchange, and influence operations. Data sharing allows training providers to align their offerings with regional needs. Interlocking relationships among employers, community-based organizations, and educators simplifies outreach, the creation of earn and learn opportunities, and the provision of critical wraparound services. When data on skilling requirements and training program outcomes are shared publicly, consumers can better assess their options, and employers can anticipate results with greater confidence.
In our search, which lasted two years, we found many extraordinary organizations, earnest businesses, nonprofits, and government entities operating in workforce development. Yet we found only a few regionally organized, collaboratively delivered workforce systems. In Texas and California, Upskill Houston and the San Diego Workforce Partnership, functioning as backbone organizations, bring together multiple regional players from across sectors in coordinated efforts to up/reskill aspiring workers. Too few such groups exist; we need more like them.
Houston and San Diego’s successful skill-based systems use shared data platforms to facilitate real-time insight into local labor markets. Applying a mix of public and proprietary data, these regional efforts assess current and projected employment. Powered by machine learning, they translate job and résumé postings into regional skill clusters and gaps. This allows local officials to determine what trainings, educational offerings, and certifications are needed to better align the supply of labor to employer demand. Transparency around outcomes allows employers, aspiring workers, and training and education organizations to make more informed decisions about where to invest their time and resources. And critically, the involvement of community-based organizations ensures the availability of critical wraparound services to aspiring workers who might not otherwise participate in training and education.
When we spoke in San Diego at an event sponsored by the nonprofit corporation formed by the workforce investment board, we felt the power of a region working together. Mayor Todd Glorio joined Workforce Board President Peter Callstrom to open the session and field questions and observations from an audience of business leaders, K-12 schools, nonprofits, community colleges, four-year universities, and more. Working together, these organizations get more people into and through the skilling pipeline than any one of them could alone, even with substantially more funding.
By convening stakeholders from across the region and focusing their efforts on shared, data-informed economic and labor market goals, Houston and San Diego marshal resources where they will do the greatest good. Unfortunately, collaborations like theirs are rare. In most regions, fragmentation dominates workforce development. For this, employers and prospective workers alike pay a price.
Still, there is cause for optimism. We know what works. Current market conditions favor action. Skill-based hiring increasingly dominates conversations about talent development. Real time insights into local labor markets encourage multi-sector actors to come together around common goals. At the federal level, major high profile workforce initiatives suggest that structural changes are on the horizon. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo captures the moment: “If we – the government, the private sector, educational institutions, and local organizations – work together…we can ensure long-term prosperity for all Americans and build a healthy, vibrant, inclusive, and competitive economy.” Indeed.
About the Author:
Kate Markin Coleman has thirty years of experience as a senior executive in the private and social sectors. Her current research, advising and speaking focuses on social sector impact, scaling, cross sector collaboration and workforce development. She directs IAS advising LLC, a strategic consultancy for social ventures. She is co-author of two recently published books, Growing Fairly; How to Build Opportunity and Equity in Workforce Development and Collaborative Cities: Mapping Solutions to Wicked Problems.
Prior to founding her advisory practice, Kate was an Advanced Leadership Fellow (ALI) at Harvard University, and before that, she served as Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Advancement Officer for YMCA of the USA.
Kate sits on the Advisory Board of NeverTechLate, the board of Social Venture Partners Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice council. She is also a member of the committee advising the university on the launch of its Leadership and Society Initiative, an ALI-like program. She has served on numerous other social sector, professional, and association boards. She has an MBA and MLA from the University of Chicago.