7

Regional Observations with National Implications

The final workshop in the six-part series aimed to reflect on the adaptability, challenges, and needs of workforce training efforts in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) across the nation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and how regional successes, discussed in the previous five workshops, can inform efforts across the nation. As Jeff Bingaman, former U.S. Senator from New Mexico, noted in his introduction to the sixth workshop, the nation is living in a tumultuous time that has disrupted countless aspects of everyone’s lives. For more than 11 million Americans, as of October 2020 that disruption includes job loss, which is both a tragedy in terms of lost wages and family stress and an opportunity to expand STEMM workforce training to meet the demands of 21st century employers.

This series of workshops, said Bingaman, aimed to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the nation’s skilled STEMM labor needs and how different regions and their workforce training programs are trying to meet these needs. The committee that planned these workshops sought to understand the different ways in which cities have responded to the labor shifts brought on by the pandemic and how cities are adapting their workforce training efforts to help displaced workers move into skilled jobs in which they can earn a living wage capable of supporting a family. After reviewing the discussions from the first five regional workshops, the committee recognized key themes across the workshop series to both highlight and discuss further in a sixth and final workshop. These themes include the

digital infrastructure needed to equitably support workforce training, the key services needed to support equitable access to workforce training, and the future design of workforce training.

REGIONAL STEMM WORKFORCE TRAINING RESPONSES IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19

In this workshop’s first session, three members of the workshop planning committee shared their views of common themes and key differences across the five cities highlighted in the preceding five workshops. The three committee members were Maria Flynn, Donna Ginther, and Rachel Lipson. Karen Elzey, another committee member, moderated this panel.

Lipson noted the complexity of the challenges the nation is facing. “At the precise moment at which we have a huge influx of folks into the unemployment system and of folks who are looking for new jobs and potentially in search of new training opportunities, we are putting enormous stresses on our system,” said Lipson, who then asked, “How do we find, contact, reach those folks, help them navigate through a complex system, and help them find opportunities that make the most sense for them at this moment?” Her main takeaway from the preceding five workshops was the multi-pronged nature of the efforts undertaken by all of the highlighted cities—for example, efforts in Boston to put paper flyers in public housing and convenience stories—to engage with unemployed workers, particularly around outreach and enrollment into new programs. Lipson added that one of the big challenges now is balancing the more traditional in-person services, such as career navigation and coaching, with access to the digital skills people need in the changing U.S. economy to secure well-paying jobs. She credited the five cities with trying innovative new approaches to addressing this challenge.

Flynn found the stories of the five communities compelling and energizing because of the innovation that is happening in those five regions as they adapt to the unique needs of their regional labor markets. She reiterated the challenge of connecting workers in industries devastated by COVID-19, such as the tourism, restaurant, retail, and hospitality industries, with STEMM workforce training programs that can provide opportunities to these workers in industries with a growing demand for a skilled STEMM workforce, including technology, healthcare, and certain manufacturing sectors.

Ginther was interested in how these five communities all had strong grassroots efforts to meet the needs of people affected by the COVID-19

pandemic. She found it encouraging that so many community-based public-private partnerships sprung up immediately after the pandemic hit and during the subsequent recession it has caused. At the same time, she was struck by the data showing the disproportionate impact of the current economic situation on women and people of color who had low-skilled jobs in the service sector. The challenge for community organizations is to help those workers move into sectors with high demand and higher wages, such as healthcare and digital technologies.

Elzey asked the panelists to talk about what has changed during the pandemic regarding who is delivering workforce training. Flynn cited how community colleges have stepped up in some interesting ways, and said she was also impressed with how rapidly many workforce training organizations flipped to online delivery and that virtual online offerings will continue once the pandemic is over. She also noted that some community-based organizations are starting to partner with one another to expand what they can do for the local unemployed or under-trained workforce.

When asked to comment on the challenges of being able to deliver services virtually, Ginther highlighted one common theme throughout the workshops—the need to greatly expand broadband internet access and make it affordable for low-income families, as well as establish mechanisms such as lending libraries that will enable trainees to work on a laptop or tablet. “You cannot take workforce training on a mobile phone,” said Ginther. She pointed out that people who could afford broadband access and who could work at home have been able to get through this crisis relatively unscathed. In contrast, those who could access the internet only on a mobile phone have not been able to get the training they need to transition from a job that has effectively disappeared to a job of the post-COVID-19 future.

Lipson commented on the professional development activities that were required to bring faculty and staff up to speed in terms of their ability to teach and train people in a digital environment. She considered this an area that merits more attention going forward. In the same vein, she noted the need to help trainees adjust to a virtual learning environment and to develop mechanisms to allow feedback from trainees to ensure that online training is working for them.

Partnerships to Get People Back to Work

Next, Elzey asked the panelists to list some of the highlights they heard regarding the ability of partnerships to get people back to work.

Ginther thought that Pack Health, in Birmingham, was a good example of a company seeing that it needed trained workers to help manage its clients’ chronic health conditions and responding by developing its own training and certification programs. “This was a dynamic and exciting model that may be useful for other industries and sectors, as we move from the service-sector jobs that are going away into higher-skilled healthcare and technical jobs,” said Ginther, who noted that those individuals who went through the online training landed well-paying jobs.

Flynn said she heard that employers were eager to move away from the four-year degree as the traditional hiring signal and toward a system of stackable, industry-recognized credentials. One perhaps unappreciated aspect of credentials and badges is that they allow people who have lost their jobs and cannot afford to stay out of the workforce for very long to get the training they need quickly and rejoin the workforce. The challenge, she said, is finding more models that integrate learning and work so that people can be sustaining themselves and their families while they are earning that next credential. Flynn was also impressed by institutions of higher education creating wireless internet hotspots in their parking lots to create broadband access for students who may not be able to afford it at home.

One program that caught Lipson’s attention was the Virginia Ready Initiative, which was able to leverage an existing infrastructure of statewide initiatives and work closely with the Virginia community college system. She also highlighted the Virginia Fast Forward workforce credential program’s efforts to help people navigate the workforce training system to find their way onto pathways that will lead them to credentials and new job opportunities while also providing them with a financial incentive to complete the program.

Matching People to Jobs

Elzey asked the panelists to address the challenge of matching people who are trying to identify the real job opportunities that exist and the trainers who are looking for individuals who will fit well in their programs. She also asked them about the types of data used by communities to better understand what a community’s needs are and create the appropriate match that can help both individuals and businesses be successful. Flynn noted that Birmingham used data from Burning Glass, a provider of real-time labor market information, to help guide its workforce training efforts. She also noted the general lack of good career navigation help in the United

States, both for workers and students. This is where community-based organizations can and do help, but the key is moving those types of programs to a larger scale.

Ginther said that detailed weekly unemployment claims can provide useful information given that those data are broken down by education, gender, race, and industry. She also pointed out that while workforce training efforts are leaning heavily on community colleges, enrollment is down at those institutions. “The people who need re-educating the most do not necessarily have the resources to invest in their education,” said Ginther. Her suggestion was to provide more earn-to-learn opportunities so that people can support their families while they are retraining.

One story Lipson found interesting was about the new hospitality center that North Essex Community College built after years of planning and fundraising only to have the food industry crash during the pandemic. For her, that raised an issue that she felt received less attention than it might have, namely, how to give people transferable skills that enable them to move across different types of occupations and roles in the workforce. In her opinion, the challenge is to provide people with skills that will be durable and resilient and that provide them with the strongest foundation possible so they can shift between jobs and even industries as the job market changes.

Imparting new skills, said Elzey, is just one part of the equation to help people move up in the world, with the other part being the social services that many people are in need of, such as childcare and transportation. Flynn noted that the pandemic has brought the conversation about supportive services into the mainstream, which was long overdue, and her hope was that it would result in more money being spent to meet the transportation and childcare needs of an increasing number of people. At the same time, there is a need to help people navigate the support services sector, which often involves going from agency to agency to access these services. “How can we be helping states and communities to streamline these efforts and make sure that resources are getting to where they are most needed?” asked Flynn.

Rethinking the Nation’s Social Safety Net

Ginther commented that, given the extent of unemployment and the length of time that people are remaining unemployed, policy makers need to be rethinking the nation’s social safety net. “COVID is a natural disaster, and we depend on our government to provide social insurance in the face of a natural disaster,” said Ginther. The problem is that state governments are

largely responsible for providing these services, but their budgets are under pressure because of the pandemic. While the nonprofit sector has stepped up, the need far exceeds its capacity to meet all the needs that exist today. “We need to think about a larger national strategy to provide support to people who lost their jobs for no reason, no fault of their own, as we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.

Lipson wholeheartedly echoed Ginther’s comments and added that there is a need to rethink what the standard set of employment benefits should be going forward. For example, with more people working at home, the traditional benefit packages that include allowances for transportation and parking might not be as relevant as they were pre-pandemic. Perhaps, she said, those funds could go toward expanding childcare, mental health services, or employee assistance programs. Her hope is that companies will lean into providing more help with the latter set of services.

Elzey then asked the panel whether there is a need for a national effort to illustrate the importance of developing a STEMM workforce and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has changed how people view a STEMM workforce. Ginther stated that a STEMM workforce is essential for the future of the nation. For example, automation will replace jobs, but there will be new opportunities to create the technical skills to program the robots and fix them. In her opinion, the displacement triggered by the pandemic has brought the future closer, increasing the urgency of shifting jobs away from the service sector to those that require more technical skills. Flynn said she would like to see the importance of STEMM jobs pushed earlier into high school or even middle school as well as among career counselors who work with the unemployed. An equally important piece is enhancing access to high-quality, work-based learning opportunities. Lipson added that it will be important when thinking about getting people into growth industries, such as healthcare, to help individuals determine the types of jobs in which they will thrive. For example, training someone for a career in healthcare may not fit that person’s interests, strengths, or feelings of safety.

Potential Policy Levers at the State and Federal Level

Turning to the subject of state and federal policy, Elzey asked the panelists to talk about the policy levers that could be used to address some of the challenges that emerged throughout the five workshops. Flynn replied that policy makers need to come up with new approaches to financing workforce training, including broadening Pell grant eligibility to include short-term

credentialing or providing more flexibility to the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act in terms of eligibility to participate and how it allocates training dollars. And even with those changes, she said, new alternatives are needed to best support students and dislocated workers. Lipson seconded those suggestions and added that the federal government should provide funding that will enable all 50 states to rebuild and enhance their existing digital infrastructure to reach everyone in this increasingly virtual and remote world. Lipson expressed hope that once the pandemic is over, the nation will take the opportunity to step back and think about the lessons learned during the pandemic as they concern workforce training and the provision of wrap-around services.

In general, said Ginther, there is a need to reduce administrative barriers to getting wrap-around services. In some states, applications for services can only be done online, while many people who need those services have only a mobile phone. She noted that 10 percent of the K-12 students in Kansas do not have internet access at home. Seeing internet access as on par with other utilities and not a luxury in today’s world, Ginther said the federal government has an opportunity to increase the nation’s broadband infrastructure, and in doing so, bring down the price so that every student and every displaced worker can afford internet access. “We need a comprehensive broadband policy for the whole country,” she added.

To conclude this panel, Elzey asked each panelist for one takeaway message. Lipson said she would highlight some of the innovations that are happening at a state and local level in this crisis environment. “It was so exciting to see the ways in which these regions and industries were iterating, adapting, and figuring things out in the moment and being flexible to try to help as many people as possible,” said Lipson. The next stage, she said, will be to figure out how to scale those innovations so that more people can benefit. Ginther said she could imagine the federal government providing a pool of grant money, to be administered by the states, that allows for providing enhanced social services and wrap-around services to support those programs that are taking root right now. “What struck me was how many local targeted innovations were occurring in all of the regions that we looked at,” said Ginther. “We just need to support them, get out of their way, and help them to support the people who are most in need.”

One thing that struck Flynn was the change in mindset among local leaders from “I can’t” to “I must.” She said it is important to remember that the work that is really happening is at the local and regional level, making it important to find those local success stories, help policy makers understand

what is playing out in those communities, and help communities learn from one another.

DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE TO EQUITABLY SUPPORT WORKFORCE TRAINING

In the workshop’s next session, three panelists discussed efforts to improve nationwide broadband access so that displaced workers can participate in virtual workforce training programs. The panelists were Matt Dunne, founder and executive director of the Center on Rural Innovation; Laura Spining, director for broadband infrastructure at the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration; and Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow in governance studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. Rick Seltzer, projects editor at Inside Higher Ed, moderated the session.

The Center of Rural Innovation, explained Dunne, is an action tank dedicated to ensuring that rural communities can succeed in the digital era. The rural opportunity gap emerged in 2008, driven by automation and globalization. Even as of January 2020, over half of the nation’s rural counties had not recovered to their pre-2008 recession levels, and all of the difference between the urban and rural economic recoveries can be accounted for by the digital economy coming to urban and not rural areas. Dunne said that job loss arising from automation hit rural areas disproportionately.

Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rural digital divide is affecting the ability of children to participate in learning, and people who might have the opportunity to work at home cannot because of limited broadband access. Addressing the rural digital divide, said Dunne, is a critical piece of ensuring that rural areas recover from the COVID-19 pandemic in better shape than they did after the 2008 recession. Spreading broadband access to every area of the country will be as important to rural economies as was the nation’s effort to electrify the entire nation in the early to mid-20th century.

Lee, who is writing a book on the U.S. digital divide, noted how digital access corresponds and correlates with the level of opportunities available to people. The disparate effects occurring in areas of the country as a result of a lack of internet access have much to do with systemic inequalities that were present before the COVID-19 pandemic. Lee explained that when the pandemic began, some 80 million people had no internet access, and this

number has likely risen given the economic devastation that has resulted in unemployment, loss of income, and even evictions. Even worse, she added, of the 50 million children sent home from the nation’s schools, between 15 and 16 million do not have broadband access or a computing device, and out of that number, 9 million are Black and brown children. These are the nation’s future workers, and if future jobs depend on being digitally literate, these children will be disadvantaged going forward. “We have to pay attention to this issue, not as something that is marginal, but that is particularly important in ensuring that the other America, the America that probably does most of the work in this country, is included in getting the benefits of digital opportunities,” said Lee.

Spining, whose agency has been working on ways of addressing the digital divide, said she has seen a dramatic increase since the COVID-19 pandemic began in an appreciation of just how urgent it is for the future of the nation to make broadband access universal. Her agency is leading the coordination of the different aspects of broadband funding that the federal government is undertaking across multiple agencies. Most of that funding comes through the Federal Communications Commission, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural utility service program funds broadband deployment. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has recently increased its funding of broadband programs as well as training sessions to help students and unemployed workers gain digital skills. States, too, have recently boosted their broadband and digital inclusion programs.

KEY SERVICES THAT SUPPORT EQUITABLE ACCESS TO WORKFORCE TRAINING

The next panel discussed higher education and social service strategies to connect displaced workers with training opportunities to meet local STEMM employment needs. The three panelists were Tamar Jacoby, president and chief executive officer of Opportunity America; Rebecca Rowley, president of Santa Fe Community College; and Paige Shevlin, director of policy and national initiatives at the Markle Foundation. Scott Gullick, senior director of Nest, YearUp’s research and design laboratory, moderated the session.

The challenge that Jacoby sees is not just the number of Americans that have been thrown out of work by the pandemic, and not just the inequitable skew of the people thrown out of work, but also an economy

that is changing so fast that it is hard to keep up or make good decisions about how to help people get or prepare for jobs. “Which jobs will be eliminated, and which will be growing?” she asked, “and most importantly, how is what we used to call the ‘future of work’ going to transform the economy in years ahead?” The COVID-19 pandemic’s economic shock has spurred a quantum leap in digitization, automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, aspects of the future of work that was thought to be a decade away but happened shortly after the pandemic began. “No one knows where the economy is going, and that makes it hard to prepare people for jobs,” said Jacoby. “There is certainly no point in training people for jobs that are going to disappear.”

When thinking about the millions of Americans who are going to need job-focused reskilling and upskilling in years ahead, it will be important to identify the institutions that can provide this, said Jacoby. To her, no institution is in better position than the community college to provide that training given their infrastructure, instructors, training facilities, and, most importantly, reach and scale. She noted that few Americans live more than a 30-minute drive from a community college, and that community colleges were educating nearly 12 million people a year even before the pandemic struck, compared to 18,000 in boot camps and 225,000 in government job training programs. While fulfilling their promising role in training Americans for the jobs of the future will require at least some change at community colleges, the good news, said Jacoby, is that the necessary changes are already underway at many of these institutions and have been for over a decade.

Going forward, Jacoby sees the need for several ingredients to prepare the nation’s workforce for the future. The first is sophisticated, up-to-date labor market information. The current survey-based government data are not of much use anymore because the world is changing too quickly. Second on her list is robust employer input. “You cannot do job-focused education and training without input from people who know the jobs, who know how their industries are changing and what skills are in demand,” she explained. While most community colleges have relationships with employers, too many of them emphasize quantity over quality, which translates into less informative and less useful collaborations.

Third, dislocated workers need better strategic navigational supports to help them identify skills they have that can be useful in a different industry. In Jacoby’s experience, too many unemployed workers make bad choices about training and often have difficulty sticking with it. The fourth, and

perhaps most important, item on her list is changing the current policies and laws that often require learners in short, job-focused programs at community colleges to pay for those programs themselves. In general, she said, individuals cannot use Pell grants to pay for those types of programs. Moreover, the training dollars available through the public workforce system do not come close to meeting the demand for training. Community colleges cannot be expected to provide training for free. The final item on her list is job placement metrics. “I believe that public funding for job-focused upskilling should be contingent on success in getting people jobs,” she said, a position she acknowledged is controversial.

Rowley began her comments by noting that community colleges see themselves as the economic generators in their communities, whether they are rural communities or major metropolitan areas. She noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has created several opportunities for community colleges, including the capacity to build stronger online programs. The pandemic has also forced these institutions to collect better data on what students need now.

In New Mexico, there is severe need for more healthcare professionals, and Santa Fe Community College is focusing on trying to ensure that its healthcare students can complete their programs on time as much as possible. To do that, Rowley’s institution is offering more clinical classes in simulation format than it would have ever done before the pandemic. She noted that this has been made possible by policy changes at the state level, as well as her school’s prioritization of small group, face-to-face instruction in its healthcare curricula as well as several other STEMM areas, to meet immediate workforce needs. She pointed out that her institution has experienced an across-the-board enrollment decline during the pandemic, but that there has been a much larger decline in its Native American student population, likely because of a lack of internet connectivity.

As many speakers throughout the workshop series had noted, low-wage workers have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as Shevlin pointed out, higher-income workers have largely recovered already. The pandemic has fundamentally changed the U.S. economy, including consumer demand and the way businesses operate, with the result that there could be a permanent loss of many low-wage jobs. In fact, said Shevlin, a recent study estimated that between 32 and 42 percent of pandemic-induced layoffs will be permanent (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, 2020). In addition, 10.1 million jobs have vanished since February 2020, so there are fewer openings for more unemployed workers to fill.

An up-side to that situation, if there is one, is that this is a good time to pursue education and training for the jobs of the future, although Shevlin pointed out that there are significant barriers to doing so, including

• Education and training programs can be expensive, and many people, especially low-wage workers, cannot afford them.
• People do not have the information and support to make informed decisions about training opportunities and career pathways.
• Other constraints, such as childcare and transportation, create additional barriers.
• Workforce and education services are not delivered equitably, exacerbating disparities along the lines of race and gender.
• Virtual and online learning may be the only feasible option for some people; however, many programs are only offered in person, and online learning presents unique challenges.

In terms of what states, regions, and local workforce boards can do without policy changes, Shevlin said they can identify effective training programs, including virtual options, and make that information widely available to address the information barrier. She pointed to the value of sending letters to unemployment insurance recipients about suitable training programs in which they could participate. During the 2008 recession, that simple step increased enrollment in postsecondary education by an astounding 40 percent, said Shevlin (Barr and Turner, 2018). She also suggested tracking program participation and setting targets for subpopulations based on the local unemployment situation.

Shevlin’s organization, the Markle Foundation, along with more than 30 partners, recently launched the Rework America Alliance with the goal of delivering this type of information to organizers that serve job seekers. It has also released a set of policy recommendations aimed at giving workers the tools they need to secure a good job (Markle Foundation, 2020). The recommendations include to

• Create an Opportunity Account, a new funding system that makes effective education and training affordable for all workers to enroll in programs that get people into well-paying jobs.
• Provide matching funding to employers that will hire and train for quality jobs, creating an incentive for employers to provide input to training programs.

• Expand career coaching to provide workers with the support to navigate the job market, training options, and pathways to economic security.
• Scale and create online learning opportunities.

Shevlin noted in closing that the Rework America Alliance also aims to help millions of workers move into good jobs, regardless of their formal education, by accelerating the development of a new system of worker training aligned to quality jobs that employers need to fill.

Discussion

Rowley discussed how her institution knew almost immediately that broadband access was going to be a problem during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for areas such as the pueblos where there is no access at all and wireless internet hotspots will not do any good. Her team created an emergency fund that quickly raised $100,000 to support student needs for everything except tuition, including paying for internet access and purchasing laptops that students could borrow.

Jacoby noted that community colleges are a mixed bag of institutions, some of which are focused on workforce training, others on getting students into bachelor’s degree–granting institutions. In general, the graduation rate is low, and the number of transferring students who go on to get their bachelor’s degree is even lower. In her opinion, community colleges need to focus more on people who have lost their jobs and helping them get the retraining they need to obtain better-paying jobs. The good news here, she said, is that community colleges appear to be getting that message and are refocusing their efforts on retraining and upskilling.

When asked about the Opportunity Account that the Markle Foundation recommends, Shevlin gave an example of how displaced workers can use those funds. Apprenticeship-readiness programs, typically full-time for 12 weeks, require a trainee to forgo earning income during the day, but they still need money to support themselves, which is a major barrier to enrolling people. These Opportunity Accounts could be used to pay for gas, food, and other necessities while enrolled in such a program. “We have to find a way to provide some additional funding for people to help them live while they are in these training programs or else we are never going to see the participation that we want among the most disadvantaged, unemployed workers,” said Shevlin.

Jacoby was asked to discuss a statewide initiative in Kentucky designed to train advanced-manufacturing technicians, the people who repair assembly lines in manufacturing plants, an initiative that has produced significant, positive results. She explained that this initiative, started by Toyota, now includes nearly 400 companies in 14 states operating together as the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education. In Kentucky, people who participated in this program are earning $45,000 a year more, five years later, than non-participating students from the same community colleges. “While not all apprenticeship programs are going to pay off in that way, this is an example of what can be done,” said Jacoby. Her hope is that by studying programs such as this, researchers will identify the elements that make it a gold standard for apprenticeship programs.

To increase connectivity between employers who have jobs available and the institutions looking to train those potential employees, Shevlin suggested giving money directly to employers and having them approach the community college with funding in hand to help the community college develop the appropriate training programs. “Giving funding to the employers and letting them drive that demand is a strategy that we should at least try,” she said. Her one caveat was that funding should only go to employers with high-quality jobs, and not, as is often the case with the current workforce system, to companies offering low-wage work. “Our proposal would be that we do not provide any subsidy for training for jobs that pay less than $35,000,” she added.

Jacoby said that she was skeptical about that idea because she observed some employers become experts at securing this money. Shevlin countered that small and medium-sized businesses have a hard time financing training, and those are the companies whose available jobs the program seeks to support. “If you do not provide funding for training, then employers will hire people who already have the skills for the job and we are never going to address the equity gap,” replied Shevlin.

One issue that Santa Fe Community College encounters is that when it initiates a workforce training program, there often is not funding available for students to enroll in that program; the institution should create that funding stream, either through grants or from an employer. “It is incumbent on us as the community college to figure out how to help a student pay for that program,” said Rowley. In her mind, it is wrong to create a strong vehicle to move people out of poverty but have that vehicle be so expensive that the targeted population cannot afford to use it.

Jacoby seconded the idea of putting money in the hands of learners to obtain training, but that should be accompanied by navigational supports to help learners get into the program that is right for them and, more importantly, complete that program. She pointed out that many dislocated workers have not been in a classroom in decades, and when they were students they may not have been good ones, which may be partly why they ended up in low-wage jobs. “This is a place where the community college and workforce system should work together,” said Jacoby. Shevlin agreed that this type of coaching is essential, and the Markle Foundation has a proposal to significantly expand coaching through the federal workforce system and local organizations.

Rowley noted that Santa Fe Community College is moving to incorporate coaching into its programs, and to also provide more information about the labor market and what it takes to enter a particular profession in the Santa Fe region. Such information will help both learners and coaches. Her institution is also starting to take a case management approach to helping students address academic barriers that keep them from persisting in their training.

Both Jacoby and Rowley called for making Pell grants available for short-term continuing education. Shevlin disagreed, though; since there is no accountability or transparency requirement for Pell grants, she worries that this would merely increase the amount of money going to the many short-term programs that are of poor quality. “What we need to do is separate out the low quality from the high-quality programs and then generously fund the high-quality programs so that we can make sure that we are spending public dollars well,” said Shevlin.

FUTURE DESIGN OF WORKFORCE TRAINING

The final session of the workshop series examined how the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on the nature of work will drive new approaches to workforce training. The three panelists were David Langdon, senior economist and senior policy advisor in the Office of the Chief Economist at the Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration; Paul Osterman, Nanyang Technological University professor of human resources and management and professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management; and Unique Morris-Hughes, the director of the Washington, DC, Department of Employment Services. Rya Conrad-Bradshaw, senior director of employer engagement at Grads of Life, moderated the session.

Langdon opened the session by discussing how the nature of unemployment is changing rapidly, shifting from large-scale and temporary job loss to more permanent job losses. Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also show that, contrary to the common perception that a great deal of employment is virtual these days, only one-fifth of employed people were teleworking because of the pandemic in October 2020. In Langdon’s view, one of the main lessons to learn from those businesses and employees that are recovering is the need to be flexible and agile. In some cases, he said, businesses are finding it easier to access and hire more diverse talent in this remote-working environment. The challenge will be blending remote work and essential in-person work in a way that does not exacerbate inequities in the workforce.

Osterman shared data on how people work in terms of their relationship to their employers (Osterman, 2020). So-called gig workers represent a mere 1.0 percent of the workforce, so, said Osterman, the U.S. economy is not being “Uberized.” He also noted that in-demand skills are within the reach of most people, and most community colleges can provide them. Demographics, he added, will create opportunities for middle-skill work. While the number of production worker jobs is projected to fall by nearly 430,000 positions between 2018 and 2028, there will be over 1.6 million openings during that time if current production workers retire at age 65, and 620,000 openings if all production workers wait until they are 70 to retire.

The United States, said Osterman, has a distinctive and remarkably complex job training system. There are school-based programs, firm-based programs, school-based adult lifetime learning programs, and remedial and sectoral programs. The main critique of the current system, he said, is that it is needlessly complicated, poorly articulated, and hard to navigate. The U.S. government, for example, has some 250 job training programs. On the other hand, the system is open and flexible, and it allows people to change their minds, which is hard to do in European systems, for example.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, demands on and expectations for the workforce training system are growing and will continue to grow substantially. Currently, employers are the largest source of training in the country, with more than half of employees having received employer-provided training in the previous 12 months, although employer training for contractors and first-job freelancers was less common (Osterman, 2020). Approximately 56 percent of white employees, 55.3 percent of Black employees, and 47.4 percent of Hispanic employees received

on-the-job training from employers. There is a sharp drop-off associated with educational level, however, with 61.1 percent of those with a college degree and 50.1 percent of those with a high school degree receiving employer training, compared with 19.5 percent of those with less than a high school degree. These disparities, said Osterman, argue for a strong public workforce training system.

Community colleges are the main source of formal training in the public higher education system, accounting for some 12 million learners a year, about half of whom are in vocationally oriented programs. Given that the quality of the programs run at the approximately 1,200 community colleges in the United States is highly variable, determining and disseminating best practices is an essential activity going forward. Osterman cited data from a randomized controlled study of a high-quality workforce development program in San Antonio known as Project QUEST showing that earning gains for those who complete that program exceeded $5,000 at six years post-completion compared to those who went through a standard program (Elliott and Roder, 2017).

Building strong programs requires money, with most of that coming via regional compacts that include employers, workforce boards, community colleges, intermediaries such as national and regional support networks, and community actors. The hardest part, Osterman said, is involving employers and convincing governors that it is worth their political capital to establish these compacts. He noted that federal funding of job training programs has fallen since the early 2000s and, while credentialing sounds like a reasonable idea, he is not sure that employers will actually use credentials, as opposed to a formal degree, as a criterion for hiring.

The final panelist, Morris-Hughes, noted that she was speaking from the perspective of an on-the-ground practitioner whose goal is to make sure that residents of the District of Columbia have a fair shot at economic prosperity and membership in the middle class through thoughtful, strategic, and innovative programming. At the time of the workshop, her department was serving three groups of people: those who were unemployed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, those who lost their jobs because of the pandemic, and a group that is often forgotten, the chronically underemployed or unemployed. The main challenge in reaching these three groups is the digital divide, she said, though the oversupply of individuals coming from neighboring areas of Maryland and Virginia is crowding out opportunities for District of Columbia residents. In addition, a recent survey suggests that many programs offered in the District of Columbia may not support the

city’s most vulnerable residents, with over 50 percent of programs reporting that they have educational requirements for entry despite targeting low-income residents.

Going forward, Morris-Hughes said that real-time jobs data over an extended time period will be crucial for ensuring that workforce training opportunities are in sync with the skills most in demand. Her department is currently building out occupational pathway maps in the context of industry pathways in order to identify programmatic training requirements and is completing a training program assessment by occupation to pinpoint any gaps and start new programs to fill those gaps. It is also conducting an assessment to identify gaps in the most critical service support areas.

Discussion

On the topic of workforce trends accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Osterman shared that the need to transition people from one set of occupations to another has increased. While employment services are supposed to help with that transition, they are severely underfunded, he said, at under $100 per client, and they are poorly connected to the workforce training system. He also pointed to the importance of better understanding the type of learning opportunities that work best for a middle-aged person who may have a high school education and been out of school for decades. Morris-Hughes said that the need to address the middle-skills gap has grown substantially during the pandemic, as has the competition for those jobs in the District of Columbia. Langdon noted the need to focus on skills-based hiring and the skills-based labor market.

When asked what advice they would give to industries and regions as they think about developing their future strategies for engaging employers, Morris-Hughes said that because of COVID-19, employers and industries need a certain level of flexibility regarding the talent pipeline that exists in a region. In addition, people seeking jobs need to be responsive to local demand and keep an open mind as to the industries in which they can apply their skills. Osterman said he would like to see employers forget about national credentialing requirements, given that most jobs are filled locally and relatively few people move to a new region to find a job. In that regard, all training programs should be regional in their skills focus.

Langdon explained that the Office of the Chief Economist at the Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration does provide federal funding to support regional economic development

strategies. He noted, though, that there is a niche trend toward employers hiring people from around the country to take advantage of telework. “If that were to take place on a relatively large scale, at least for certain types of occupations, would that lead to a disconnect between a local population and economic development taking place in that area?” he asked. Conrad-Bradshaw said she believes that some regions will become remote work regions, with Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Harford, Connecticut, already considering such a strategy.

In her final question, Conrad-Bradshaw asked the panelists to comment on the role of the employer going forward. Osterman said that employers are of course central given that they are the ones with jobs, and they should become more involved in partnerships with educational institutions and local workforce development boards. Langdon believes that employers are involved and are paying for most workforce development, but he acknowledged that they should be more involved as partners with other institutions in their regions. Morris-Hughes noted the importance of engaging employers in an authentic and meaningful way and recognizing them for the work they do.

To conclude the workshop, Bingaman highlighted two factors that make the subject of the six workshops particularly important at this time. One is the enormous flux occurring in the workforce today, with the large number of people who are unemployed and the number of people who are seeking a different type of employment. A second factor, he said, is the recent election that provides opportunities for people coming into office, from President Biden down to officials elected at the local level, to put job training higher on the public agenda and provide more resources to assist with job training opportunities.

COMMON THEMES DISCUSSED ACROSS THE WORKSHOP SERIES

The workshop series sought to advance conversations across different U.S. cities on meeting their STEMM workforce needs in the wake of COVID-19. While the panel discussions were focused on individual cities’ needs and resources, several themes emerged across the workshop series. These themes, compiled by this summary’s rapporteurs, are presented in Box 7-1.

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