Person:

Gable, Alexis

The future of work increasingly requires workers of all education levels to reskill and upskill. As the rate of emerging technologies integrating into work rises, so do the costs to people who do not update their skills. Crucial skills for the future of work can be learned in reskilling and upskilling workforce programs.

While the U.S. workforce development sector provides an infrastructure for training workers to succeed in the workplace, this sector goes largely unrecognized due to its fragmentation. Practitioners and researchers alike have struggled to understand the connected picture of how higher education institutions, apprenticeships, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit organizations train American workers.

This working paper describes the Workforce Almanac, a first-of-its-kind effort to understand workforce training at a system-wide level. We provide a new open-source directory of nearly 17,000 workforce training providers across the United States. This dataset (available at http://www.workforcealmanac.com) offers ​​the most comprehensive view to date of U.S. workforce training providers, including provider names, locations, and types. To create this Almanac, we combined training provider information from four distinct sources into one new dataset, capturing federal Registered Apprenticeship providers, nonprofit providers, Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)-eligible training providers, and higher education providers.

This report describes and analyzes the more than 75,000 “Eligible Training Provider” (ETP) programs in the United States. ETP programs are job training programs deemed eligible for funding under America’s primary federal workforce development law, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA).[1] Among other functions, WIOA funds vouchers for unemployed or underemployed workers to enroll in job training services. The vouchers are typically used to support enrollment in short-term, non-four-year-degree programs that connect to "in-demand employment” opportunities in a regional economy. Under the law, each state and territory must maintain a list of pre-approved programs that eligible individuals may select from. The programs on these lists (commonly known as “eligible training provider lists” – ETPLs) comprise our primary unit of analysis.

We analyze federal and state data sources to better understand the publicly-funded job training landscape in the United States. We combine training provider and program data from the Department of Labor (DOL) with individual performance records and occupational datasets to study the types of providers receiving WIOA funding and the kinds of jobs for which they are training. In addition, we look at state websites for all 50 U.S. states to understand how program information is made available to potential enrollees. Our analysis seeks to answer three primary research questions:

1. What are the most common characteristics of WIOA-eligible training providers and programs?
2. Which fields of study and occupations are most commonly supported by federal funding?
3. Is federal funding for workforce training directed towards good-paying and in-demand occupations?

In the wake of COVID-19 and growing inequality, America needs more pathways that bridge education and career. New research from the Project on Workforce at Harvard draws on data from New Profit's Postsecondary Initiative for Equity to identify opportunities for the education-to-employment field and chart the course for connections to good jobs.