RPI 3.0 represented a significant step forward in California’s ongoing effort to promote a regional approach to workforce development.

This is a new area for most employers and workforce development professionals. The coronavirus pandemic has been toxically stressful or traumatic for everyone to some degree. Given the universal human stress test of 2020 and 2021, there is a window of opportunity to bring these concepts and approaches to the fore in workplaces and the broader workforce system.

While there has been a high level of interest in integrating these programs, most efforts to integrate have been modest. The research presented in this brief highlights four key strategies states can implement to bolster their integration efforts.

These summary findings provide a snapshot in time (November 2020) of the outcomes for the JOIN CBOs that participated in the Fall 2019/Winter 2020 WBN survey. Data submitted to the national WBN survey were analyzed from 14 JOIN programs operated by 14 organizations and 77 National programs from 51 organizations.

The food production pathway encompasses occupations involved in the growing and raising of Michigan foods. It encompasses crop production and animal production, as well as fishing, hunting, and trapping. Most jobs in Michigan within this subsector are in crop production.

The Detroit Economic Mobility Grant initiative demonstrated that adult education and occupational training programs can work together to substantially improve learner results by accelerating instruction and contextualizing it to work. Ten organizations or pairs of workforce and adult education organizations received a total of nearly $1 million from 2018-2020 to pilot four evidence-based models for more effectively helping adults gain foundational skills crucial to employment opportunities.

This report examines the state of foundational skills in Detroit as well as four evidence-based approaches being employed elsewhere in the country that produce improved results.

In April 2017, Connecting Credentials convened five workgroups of diverse leaders in credentialing reform to tackle particularly challenging aspects of achieving the vision of a learner-centered credentialing ecosystem articulated in the 2016 From National Dialogue to Collective Action: Building Learning-Based Credentialing Systems.

This report describes the multi-year Twin Cities Benchmarking Initiative: its design and approach to capacity building, the role of funders in nurturing culture change, and the results achieved. It highlights the examples, lessons—and promise—that findings hold for workforce development nonprofits and their funders in other locales across the nation.

This report, the second of a two part series, is the culmination of a research effort to create a workforce system “map” which would inform a comprehensive and data-driven understanding of Detroit’s workforce development assets, opportunities, and challenges.