Better Skilling

Even at current employment levels, today’s labor market development system leaves millions of aspiring workers ill-prepared for jobs that pay a living wage. While right and left argue about what is wrong with the economy, across the country we found nonprofits, businesses, and local governments successfully helping struggling Americans along a path to upward mobility. Yet in too many places and at too high a price, we approach workforce issues much as we did 30 years ago.

Improvements in our understanding of brain science, cross-sector collaboration, and the critical elements of effective programs when combined with the use of regional skills data make it possible to construct a more equitable, effective system of workforce development.

Through the lens of 10 principles, Growing Fairly explains how local leadership can architect a better skilling system—one that addresses the needs of individuals from a variety of circumstances, employs innovative practices, and overcomes fragmentation.

The design principles or system requirements that form the core of the book’s recommendations are drawn from our research on effective organizations and initiatives. We wrote this book for practitioners. Much of it is told through the voices of those who run programs and the people who have taken advantage of them. Although we come from different ends of the political spectrum, we eschew rhetoric in favor of pragmatics. We know change is possible having ourselves been practitioners in the public, private, and social sectors. Although the issues we address are profound, our take on the subject is optimistic.

The excerpt that follows is drawn from the first and last chapters of Growing Fairly. We begin by summarizing the principles upon which to construct a more effective and equitable workforce development system. We conclude with a challenge. We know what works but change requires will and upending decades of entrenched practice.—Stephen Goldsmith & Kate Markin Coleman

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Our economy needs to work for more Americans. Current and future workers need realistic pathways to living wage jobs. They need access to the training and education necessary to qualify for better jobs. They need adequate transportation and childcare. In this book, we will meet local leaders who are creating opportunity—for residents seeking their first job and employees seeking their next job. We will see communities that have come together to make a difference and hear from the individuals they helped. The past several decades have witnessed dramatic economic growth, but the benefits of that growth have not been equitably shared. Fair growth requires local action and rethinking how we skill and support working age adults.

While we come to this project with different political philosophies and with work experiences in different sectors, we share a common belief. Economic opportunity lies out of reach for far too many people because of where they live, their race, or their access to quality education.

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For more than two years, often in-person pre-COVID-19 and then, subsequently, by video conferencing, we traveled across the country, from San Diego and Los Angeles to New York and Boston, interviewing leaders and staff from high-performing organizations. We met with mayors, chiefs of staff, and other leaders from across the country in forums at Harvard’s Kennedy School. We interviewed participants involved with dozens of programs, sometimes labeled “workforce” and other times referred to as “education” or “training.”

We concentrated primarily on the actions of nonprofits and local and state government but also, albeit to a more limited extent, looked at college and employer-based programs. The review included organizations that help the unemployed and underemployed as well as those fully employed but seeking upward mobility to better jobs. We included programs that focus on education and training and initiatives that support persons struggling to overcome personal, family, or location-based roadblocks. We searched for the key elements that should be incorporated as part of an optimal regional response.

Ours is an expansive definition of “workforce” that includes the larger set of activities designed to improve the skills and opportunities of workers, not just those associated with the federally funded workforce investment boards.

As a joint project of a Republican and a Democrat, this book rejects choosing between conservative views that assume that anyone who works hard will succeed and more progressive views that simply demand more government support. We argue, instead, for a broader shared narrative about potential, one that demonstrates how greater cross-sector collaboration can enhance upward economic mobility for those whose prospects have dimmed.

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The current labor market development system leaves too many individuals unemployed or underemployed. Improvements in our understanding of how and why people learn, coupled with the use of much better real-time data, makes it possible to build a fairer system that creates greater opportunity. The following chapters articulate ten design principles that create a framework for local action and cross-sector collaboration. Together, these principles form the scaffolding upon which to construct a more equitable workforce system, one that will move more people to work and to better jobs.

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The design principles featured in this book fall into three categories: those that apply to the people the system is intended to serve, those that apply to the organizations supporting those individuals, and those that apply systemwide.

We begin our discussion of principles by describing the broad array of people for whom skilling is a pathway to greater mobility. To accommodate the distinctive characteristics of a population diverse in confidence, skills, and background, the system must bring together a broad array of providers whose efforts are tailored to the varying needs of different segments within the population.

We feature the design elements of high-performing programs in chapters 3 through 6. Chapter 3 discusses the importance of personalization in organizations that tailor aspects of their approach to meet the unique needs and circumstances of individual participants. Through personalization, these organizations assess fit, determine readiness, and tailor training and resources accordingly.

Skills training and/or education alone is not enough. Individuals face a host of logistical and psychological obstacles that make program participation and completion difficult. Effective programs support learners by working with them to remove or mitigate the barriers that stand in their way.

Chapter 4 discusses a range of supports, from wraparounds to incentives, highlighting the important role coaches play in helping students access resources and navigate successful completion.

Chapter 5 explores contextualized learning. Because individuals learn in different ways conditioned by their context and informed by the opportunities they seek, exceptional programs often combine technical skill development with career readiness preparation and adult basic education. These learning contexts also integrate business culture, vocabulary, and protocols into classroom material.

Chapter 6 establishes the importance of building bridges or on-ramps to employment into program design. The chapter looks at experiential learning activities, like intern and apprenticeship programs, and sectoral initiatives that clarify career pathways and provide direct access to employers.

Next, we discuss design principles that improve the way the system operates at the regional level. Chapter 7 lays out the critical design principle of using skills as a medium of exchange. We argue that workers who lack a college degree do, in fact, possess in-demand skills. The chapter examines how to create a regional skill-based system and the implications of such a system on major stakeholders, from worker and employer to post-secondary providers of education and training. This chapter also reviews best practices of employers using skills to advance promotion inside their businesses or industry.

Transparency and performance are the focus of chapter 8, which addresses the type of information learners need to advance their journeys. The chapter shows how delivering useable information on required skills and the performance of training and education programs will help consumers of further education or training make informed choices about their options.

Chapter 9 looks at design solutions that address the many “taxes” communities impose on hard-pressed workers and would-be workers. High housing costs, inadequate transportation, lack of affordable/ high-quality daycare options, and discrimination based on race or previous incarceration make labor market participation challenging. No one entity, no one sector, can meet the demands of an effective workforce development system. Fragmentation too often plagues regional efforts.

Chapter 10 discusses the need for cross-sector collaboration managed by respected intermediaries and governed by principles that will lead to agreed-upon outcomes. The discussion of cross-sector collaboration focuses on their role in ensuring that all critical parts of the system are reflected in the community’s design. The chapter shows how collaborations benefit from the use of shared data to help learners move up the mobility ladder, assist education and training providers be more precise in their offerings, and assist academics and funders in evaluating efficacy.

Chapter 11 examines Houston, Texas, as an example of a community bringing together the design principles discussed in this book. Houston is a work in progress and an example of how one community is attempting to bridge neighborhood, class, and race divides to produce upward economic mobility.

We close with the story of UpSkill Houston because it combines an effective intermediary with an inspiring goal, strong partners, and a community call to action. We learn from UpSkill how the cross-sector fusion of various points of view into a set of coordinated, data-driven responses can create opportunity. The benefits of coordination, resting on a skill-based foundation, are manifest in many ways, from the design of curriculum and classrooms to the creation of intern or apprentice programs to arranging support services like transportation.

Intolerance of Mediocrity

Houston’s model is worth emulating. But it is only a start. The urgency with which we must address flaws in the current system requires intolerance of mediocrity. We cannot accept what does not work or become complacent when an earnest idea does not produce results. Lifting the incomes of Americans requires more than coordination. It requires cross-sector leaders willing to use their platforms to challenge the status quo and drive resources to what works.

Levers

We started this book by calling for a shared goal and a new narrative concerning the urgent need to improve economic mobility so we can grow together fairly. This goal requires more than new programs, new structures, and new funds tethered to an imperfect status quo. Government, business, and philanthropic leadership must advocate for change, challenge what does not work, and drive resources to what does, using all available levers, including the following:

1. Rhetoric: Elected leaders have an outsized voice that they should use to call the community together on behalf of fairness and human potential. A shared narrative of a better economy with more fairness needs to be clear. This includes acknowledging the grievous systemic flaws that have produced the inequities we see today.
2. Authority: Government exercises real authority. It designates preferred community groups in ways that empower them, enhancing their fund ing and representation. Officials appoint board members to governmental, quasi-governmental, and nonprofit boards. A condition of appointment should be that board members rigorously insist on results for every dollar spent. We cannot afford good intentions disconnected from excellent performance.
3. Resources: Governments, foundations, and businesses fund and invest in organizations, workers, and prospective workers. Performance funding and an insistence on reasonably demonstrated results should be part of every contract and expenditure of public dollars.
4. Information and transparency: Leaders must insist on collecting and publishing real-time information. This will enhance consumer choice and ensure resources go where they are likely to make the most positive impact.

Activation

At the end of our research, we gathered together in a few small groups the leaders of the high-performing organizations we had studied and come to know. We asked them about reach, about what they thought would accelerate conversion to a more effective and equitable workforce development system like the one proposed here. Not unexpectedly, these high-performing organizations started and ended our conversations with performance, although they got there in different ways. They argued that investment should follow performance, a point that should be obvious but is not, in practice, widely applied. Paying for results drives resources to programs that work through mechanisms such as pay for success contracting and income sharing agreements, much needed accelerants for change.

They cautioned, however, that paying for results makes sense only if we pay for the right results. They allude to the sometimes perverse consequences of current metrics that measure activity rather than outcomes. Two leaders cited, for instance, payments contingent upon whether a person was in a classroom or had completed a training session rather than whether he or she actually got and kept the intended job. The butts in seats phenomena, as they so elegantly put it.

The group shared a variety of recommendations for structural changes to free up resources for effective programing. Workforce investment boards should, they argued, use a higher percentage of their funds for training individuals and less maintaining so many “one-stop” intake centers. They suggested investing in career and employment navigation systems rather than physical infrastructure. Fragmented federal and state funding streams mean that all too frequently too low a percentage of the monies allocated actually make it into training. Some noted, as recipients of government and philanthropic grants are wont to do, that grant requirements create high overhead costs and can be so onerous as to make their receipt unworthy of the time. Some have opted to forgo Work Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) funding altogether.

They took up the subject of certifications where substantial resources are currently invested. Of course, certifications can ensure quality, but they also can create costs and processes unrelated to results. If a person can pass the licensing test because she is unusually smart and in an unusually good program, does she need to endure the hardship of finishing every week of training? They proposed taking a hard look at occupational certification requirements to determine which are and are not truly necessary. They also suggested looking at who provides those certifications, observing that, for instance, monopoly power situates training for certain health care certifications with hospitals rather than skilling intermediaries with lower operating costs.

Looking to the future, the group argued for a more expansive, less tradition-bound way of thinking about the roles of different players in the system. Private employers, they said, should more frequently partner with knowledgeable and successful training organizations— furnishing capital and then paying for successful training and preparation of the nontraditional student. This, they argue, would force education and training entities to focus on growing occupations and skilling gaps and reward those that produce qualified employees. They see a role for philanthropy to provide risk and innovation capital to prove out interventions.

Of course, the high performers challenge their own models constantly. Thus, they encourage funders to reward risk! To this insistence, we add an aside of our own. The best programs use analytics to evaluate their own interventions, to calibrate them to the needs of specific individuals, and to constantly understand which actions create the most good. For many small organizations, sophisticated use of data is an elusive dream. Funders should consider funding third-party services that assist organizations in their pursuit of operational excellence.

Inexpensive, quick fixes for many nontraditional workers do not last. There are, they say, no silver bullets. Pay attention to the science, expect relapse, and move quickly when a person needs something additional or a program needs something new. These leaders are willing to take chances. We must, too.