Shoes To Walk the Talk: Four Steps for Workforce Systems to Advance Our Own Workforce

In "The Cobblers Children Have No Shoes," we made the case that the workforce development field - the professionals, leaders, and organizations tasked with helping workers build skills for work and with encouraging businesses to adopt positive employment practices - often struggles with investing in the professional development and quality work experience of their own teams. Here, we offer four strategies workforce professionals can use to cobble together shoes so that they can walk the talk. This essay draws primarily from our experiences working with local partners in designing, implementing, and scaling the Aspen Institute's long-running Workforce Leadership Academies. These Academies provide a forum for local leaders to work collaboratively to identify local and regional systems-based challenges and create shared solutions.

Analyze Local Workforce Employers and Worker Needs

Local workforce development ecosystems are complex and come in all shapes and sizes. Workforce professionals might be employed in community colleges, city, state, and local governments, industry associations, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and other community-based organizations. They work in a wide array of occupations and professions, each with varying wages, benefits, working conditions, job titles, and required skill sets. Turnover rates and advancement opportunities vary across organizations, with some professionals feeling the pressure to move from under resourced institutions to jobs in other parts of the system with better compensation. There are few studies of this workforce. Commissioning a local analysis of our own workforce needs and issues - as we encourage other industries to do - could serve as the basis for developing job quality improvement strategies locally that result in significant service improvements.

Facilitate Stronger Connections Among Workforce Professionals

Local workforce leaders and practitioners have organized their field-building and collaborative work to varying extents. Some have established local or state coalitions, annual conferences, regular informational sessions, and newsletters. Others offer certifications for frontline workers, academies focused on policy, trauma-informed care, and race equity. Some host national organizing initiatives, such as the National Skills Coalition for state coalitions and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions for local funders' collaboratives. But in many areas, opportunities for practitioners to connect and collaborate are few, if they exist at all. Fellows who gather in Workforce Leadership Academies might have heard of each other or met across the competitive setting of a crowded RFP bidders' conference, but many say they wish they knew about the work other practitioners have been up to in their greater community. Investments in locally based, field-wide training and advancement can facilitate relationship-building, create a better understanding of the larger ecosystem, promote shared frameworks, and stimulate more naturally occurring - rather than only grant-required - collaboration.

Change the Incentives and Underlying Mental Model

In this field of practice, which is often funded by performance-based contracts, the number of job placements has served as a persistent measure of success. Public and private grants are often short-term and measured in immediate job outcomes. The level of allowable per-participant and administrative costs puts significant pressure on frontline workers, with impacts on wages and job instability. This, in turn, results in turnover that undermines the relationships with job seekers, employers, and partners on which the field's success depends. It also requires making the case to funders about how increased investments in our own workers can improve the outcomes for those we serve. We need to promote the commonsense idea that by providing job stability and investments in workforce workers' skills, the field can retain valuable talent, build professional relationships, and provide more effective services - ultimately maximizing the value of the resources invested. As employers, implementing job quality strategies ourselves can give workforce professionals a practical understanding of challenges and needs when discussing workforce issues with private sector employers.

Raise Up Workforce Professionals' Voices

Many workforce organizations seek to amplify workers' voices as a strategy for changing employer practice - for example, by providing worker feedback to employers interested in improving their human resource practices, or by connecting with formal unions, worker centers, or other worker advocacy groups. Workers' voices in local workforce ecosystems start with those being served: the participant, the job seeker, and the worker. Ensuring that their voices help shape the delivery of services is essential; there is no substitute for lived experience to ensure that services are delivered with rather than simply delivered to. For example, the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce is exploring how program participants define successful outcomes and how those benchmarks can inform program design.

Workforce organizations are also employers themselves. Leaders can embed within their own operations the same racial equity practices, job stability, and career pathways that we are promoting among other employers. Given the typical incentives, this can be challenging. Workforce leaders could find ways to come together across competitive lines, as we encourage other industries to do, and identify the common issues they face in order to develop strategies about the field's workforce and talent development. Policy change is also needed, and workforce professionals' and participants' voices are needed to raise the visibility of the field. This means investing in building and strengthening local workforce coalitions to bring these voices to press for the policy change, which can result in quality jobs and consequently higher quality service.

In California, ReWork the Bay, supported by the James Irvine Foundation and partnered with Jobs for the Future and Path Group, is tackling the job quality paradox with eight nonprofit workforce organizations. This worker-led participatory research project aims to reimagine job quality for frontline workforce development staff and develop strategies for improvement.

Conclusion

As noted in our earlier blog, leaders and practitioners are hard at work "ushering in a future where the workforce development field is more reflective of the change it seeks to cultivate." Let's continue to cobble good shoes: a local understanding of our own workforce needs; opportunities for professionals to build skills and relationships on which collaboration can grow; measurements that will get us what we need; and amplified voices of the field's own workforce to advocate for change. In our most recent Workforce Leadership Academies, 173 people across eight regions collectively gave 2,985 days to learning and working together to generate ideas for growing the effectiveness of their local workforce ecosystem. The talent and passion are there for walking this hopeful path.

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